Dr Megan Price1, Professor Ruth Blakeley
1University Of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Biography:
Megan Price is a Postdoctoral Research associate in international relations at the University of Sheffield where she works on the themes of violence and legitimacy particularly in the context of counterterrorism. A PhD graduate of the University of Queensland, she is returning to Australia to take up a lectureship in International Relations at the University of Western Australia.
Abstract:
The endurance of the Guantánamo Bay military prison presents a puzzle. The Obama administration ordered it closed, most of the remaining prisoners have never been charged with an offence, and the financial costs of running it are astronomical. There is much work explaining why the prison has been so stubbornly persistent. These accounts draw attention to the political and legal constraints attached to transferring ‘terrorists’ out of the facility and the legacy of the CIA Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program. While valuable, this existing work understates Guantánamo’s centrality in an ongoing global war on terror project. Legal contestation concerning the fate of detainees has long constituted the boundaries of the US’s global operations against al Qaeda and ‘it’s associates. Presently, Guantánamo’s constitutive role resurfaces in contestation surrounding the accelerating decline in detainee health and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The implication is that Guantánamo is difficult to close because legal fights over the detainees potentially unravel the key assumptions of the forever war.