About this Event
Join us to hear the NATO Association of Canada’s Editor-in-Chief Dr Joseph McQuade discuss his new book A Geneology of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of An Idea with Jawad Hussain Qureshi, Senior South Asia Analyst at the Government of Canada’s Privy Council Office.
About the Book
Using India as a case study, McQuade demonstrates how the modern concept of terrorism was shaped by colonial emergency laws dating back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the ‘thugs’, ‘pirates’, and ‘fanatics’ of the nineteenth century, McQuade traces the emerging legal category of ‘the terrorist’ in early twentieth-century colonial law, ending with an examination of the first international law to target global terrorism in the 1930s. Drawing on a wide range of archival research and a detailed empirical study of evolving emergency laws in British India, he argues that the idea of terrorism emerged as a deliberate strategy by officials seeking to depoliticize the actions of anti-colonial revolutionaries and that many of the ideas embedded in this colonial legislation continue to shape contemporary understandings of terrorism today.
Samuel Moyn, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of History at Yale University, calls the book, “An essential contribution to imperial and international legal history.”
Our Speakers
Jawad Hussain Qureshi is a senior South Asia analyst at the Government of Canada’s Privy Council Office – i.e., the federal cabinet secretariat – serving since 2009. He has focused on South Asia in his academic work at McGill University, Concordia University and the University of British Columbia. He has also worked in Kandahar, Afghanistan and Dhaka, Bangladesh on assignments for the Government of Canada. Qureshi has also served on secondments with international partners in Washington D.C. and Canberra and published joint assessments with them. Prior to joining the Canadian federal government, Qureshi worked in broadcast media in Pakistan and as a South Asia analyst with the International Crisis Group (ICG).
Joseph McQuade is the Editor-in-Chief of the NATO Association of Canada, where he also runs the Cybersecurity and Emerging Security program. He is also the Richard Charles Lee Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asian Institute of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, a former Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship recipient, as well as the Managing Editor of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. Dr McQuade completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, with his dissertation examining the history of counter-terrorism laws forming the basis of his book, A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea. Dr McQuade has also published widely in academic journals such as the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, the Journal of World History, and History Compass, and has commented on current affairs for national news broadcasters such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and CTV.
