Abstract

The concept of the ‘pre-criminal space’ has seen increasing uncritical use in countering terrorism policy since 9/11. It is understood by critical scholars primarily as a new legal temporality that brings forward the ‘threshold of criminal responsibility’, thus allowing for pre-emptive, suspicion-based criminalisation. This has allowed for the validation of measures such as arbitrary arrest and detention, bogus trial and restrictions on liberty, and is evidenced as being applied in an Islamophobic and racialised manner to entire communities. Furthermore, in our contemporary moment of Covid-19 where the emergency tools used to regulate hygiene and infection intersect with those used in countering terrorism work, critics are increasingly concerned about the expansion and normalisation of the pre-criminal space and its use in pathologising and medicalised ways. Using archival research, this article adapts the contemporary concept of the ‘pre-criminal’ to a historical and medico-legal context. In doing so it traces how the history of infectious diseases – in particular VD – has shaped the space through slippages between hegemonic understandings of morality, hygiene, vagrancy and extremism. I show how the ‘vagrant’ nature of disease marked racialised, gendered and classed subjects as potentially infectious and immoral. Looking particularly at the regulation of sex workers in British-occupied Egypt, I conceptualise the power struggles between actors including the British administration, British abolitionist feminists and the Egyptian government as a securitisation network which infiltrated the lives of Egyptians and marked them as suspicious. I further show how the encroachment upon everyday lives was made even more possible through the implementation of martial law. In this way, I suggest that contemporary British forms of pre-criminality and risk can be understood as a latent form of coloniality present in law-making practices.

摘要

自 9/11 以来，“犯罪前空间”的概念在反恐政策中得到越来越多的非批判性使用。批判性学者主要将其理解为一种新的法律时间性，它提出了“刑事责任的门槛”，从而允许先发制人的、基于怀疑的刑事定罪。这使得诸如任意逮捕和拘留、虚假审判和限制自由等措施得到验证，并被证明以仇视伊斯兰教和种族化的方式应用于整个社区。此外，在我们当代的 Covid-19 时刻，用于管理卫生和感染的紧急工具与用于反恐工作的工具相互交叉，批评者越来越关注犯罪前空间的扩大和正常化及其在病理化和医学化方面的使用。通过档案研究，本文将“犯罪前”的当代概念改编为历史和医学法律背景。在这样做的过程中，它追溯了传染病的历史——尤其是 VD——如何通过对道德、卫生、流浪和极端主义的霸权理解之间的滑移来塑造空间。我展示了疾病的“流浪”性质如何将种族化、性别化和分类的对象标记为潜在的传染性和不道德的。特别关注英国占领的埃及对性工作者的监管，我将包括英国政府在内的演员之间的权力斗争概念化，英国废奴主义女权主义者和埃及政府作为一个证券化网络渗透到埃及人的生活中并将他们标记为可疑。我进一步展示了如何通过实施戒严令对日常生活的侵犯变得更加可能。通过这种方式，我建议当代英国形式的犯罪​​前和风险可以被理解为存在于立法实践中的一种潜在的殖民主义形式。