This chapter explores denationalization, focusing on Indonesian foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs). Post-9/11 and during the Arab Spring, Western democracies tightened border control to combat terrorism, enabling the stripping of citizenship from involved individuals. Denationalization, via law or public-authority decisions, emerged as a contentious counter-terrorism tool. Indonesia, as a Muslim-majority Southeast Asian nation, partially embraced denationalization, refusing to repatriate Indonesian FTFs. This aligns with global security concerns but raises statelessness questions. The chapter examines denationalization’s legal framework, international obligations, and the blurred line between de jure and de facto statelessness. Critics argue that disproportionately applying denationalization to Muslims undermines human rights, inter-state cooperation and international justice. Refusal to repatriate Indonesian FTFs raises concerns about long-term consequences and due process. Understanding denationalization nuances is vital, considering its impact on the citizenship rights of individuals involved in terrorism.

Chapter 3 focuses on the figure of the jihadist in the context of the Syrian Civil War. Outlawed as a terrorist by the Security Council and perceived as a security threat in home states, this latest version of the enemy of humanity seems to have nothing in common with previous foreign fighters. The aim of the chapter is to re-inscribe this actor within the longer history of foreign volunteering. It shifts from domestic debates to national courtrooms, showing how the jihadist combatant gets constantly split in two: idealist and fanatic, hero and villain, martyr and freedom fighter. Based on previous images of the foreign fighter, these dichotomies highlight different conceptions of freedom and hence problematize its current conflation with terrorism. The chapter ends with a digression on the laws of war, revealing the persisting cultural bias used against certain foreign combatants through the domestic application of IHL.

The law of transnational counter-terrorism comes in various forms, encompassing hard-law instruments like Security Council resolutions, regulatory instruments like good practices or guidance, and managerial instruments like the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. Law is a critical instrument in the post-9/11 approach to developing, reorienting, and globalising a particular orientation towards counter-terrorism. This chapter outlines the dynamics of transnational counter-terrorism law, considering the Security Council’s ascendant position as a lawmaker in this field, the ways in which the regulatory activities of informal institutions are ‘hardened’ through Security Council engagement (thus identifying them as pseudo law-making entities), and how the approach adopted in the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy reinforces these practices. The chapter shows how, through the variety of its forms and addressees, the law of transnational counter-terrorism transports the logics of transnational counter-terrorism into everyday practices of administration, criminal justice, surveillance, all the while marginalising rights.

Especially in the aftermath of 9/11, states’ counterterrorism efforts have increasingly sought to use criminal law preventively, by criminalizing conduct before a terrorist crime is committed, including preparatory acts, and acts that contribute or support terrorism such as financing or providing material support. While a preventive use of criminal law is not in itself problematic, basic principles of human rights law pose limits to its use. In this context, the current Chapter analyses recent legislative-type counterterrorist resolutions by the Security Council in the areas of criminalising "foreign terrorist fighters" and the financing of terrorism. It argues that in both Resolution 2178 (2014) and Resolution 2462 (2019) the Security Council has also increasingly moved towards the criminalization of conduct before a terrorist crime is committed. Such a move poses dangers not only for a number of international legal standards, but also for humanitarian workers operating in certain contexts, while a number of questions remain with regard to the application of these legal regimes and how they interact with the existent counter-terrorism architecture, in particular the proscription of terrorist organizations at the national level and the Security Council ISIL (Da'esh) & Al-Qaida Sanctions regime, as well as the work of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

An increasing number of countries, especially the UK, have expanded their legal powers to deprive citizens of their nationality in response to terrorism. The trigger for the mounting focus on this tactic has been the advent of Islamic State and the phenomenon of Foreign Terrorist Fighters (FTFs) travelling to Iraq and Syria. The weaponization of nationality has therefore been adapted to this situation so that citizens can be treated as if they were foreigners. In this way, the FTFs can be divested of citizenship and of rights. This paper will explain these developments against the declining inspiration of ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’. So, the paper first needs to explore notions of citizenship and then to look at the decline of ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’ which provides space for counter-terrorism weaponization. The paper does not contend that cosmopolitan citizenship forbids any weaponization but highlights important provisos which draw attention to human rights and other principled and policy constraints which also must be explored and weighed.

This concluding chapter draws The Law of the List together and is structured in three parts. First, the key arguments of the book are reiterated by providing a brief summary of each chapter. Second, six original contributions the book brings to the study of global security law and governance are highlighted. These include: (i) studying global law empirically as an assemblage of relations and practices, (ii) studying ‘the global’ through local structure-making sites rather than from international institutions (like the Security Council), (iii) mapping the politics of expertise in global law-making, (iv) studying technologies of governance as devices that assemble legal and political relations and that have performative effects, (v) analysing how preemptive security produces novel rearrangements of law and governance that require empirical study, and (vi) rethinking global emergency governance as something assembled from mundane practices, rather than an effect of sovereign power. The chapter closes by arguing that the Law of the List, first introduced as a temporary preventive measure by the Security Council, is now a permanent feature of the global security law landscape. This book is an experiment in strategic knowledge production and an invitation for further socio-legal studies of global security law to come.