Transnational Legal Assemblages and Global Security Law: Topologies and Temporalities of the List

Abstract

This article examines the UN 1267 Al-Qaida sanctions regime as a technique of global security listing and form of transnational law with distinct legal ordering processes. Conventional literatures frame these sanctions in formalist terms, flattening their complexity. Understanding their qualities and effects demands a dynamic approach capable of grasping how global law unfolds in each of its constitutive dimensions—normative, temporal and spatial. To that end, this paper develops an analytical framework of transnational legal assemblage and deploys it to examine (i) the proposed changes to EU court rules to enable the handling of secret intelligence and (ii) the fortification of exceptional space for pre-emptive security action. Situating this regime within a contested and emergent field of transnational legal assemblage renders it more variegated and contingent than ordinarily thought, opening up different ways of framing the accountability problems, authority claims, normative conflicts and governance practices of global security law.