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Anti-terrorism and the Harmonization of Media and Communication Policy
Introduction
One of the least discussed, but most influential, processes by which media and communication policy have become “global” is legal harmonization, the establishment of laws and regulations that are like each other across states irrespective of differences in legal and political systems. Harmonization, also known as policy convergence, policy transfer, and legal globalization, is not new (Braman 1993), but it has been growing in importance for the past several decades. A review of the literature across the terrain of the law (Braman 2009) shows that harmonization processes involve not only the formal processes of government but also the formal and informal processes of both private and public sector entities involved in governance, and the cultural habits and predispositions of governmentality.
Legal historians consider this period of legal harmonization to be equivalent in importance to the period during which the international system of geopolitically recognized states first formed several hundred years ago (Kirby 2006). Nowhere is this fundamental transformation of law–state–society relations more clear than in anti-terrorism as both motive for, and the content of, legal harmonization in areas critical to media and communication policy.1 Elements of the emerging configuration include a strengthening of the executive at the cost of legislative and judicial functions, practice-driven ...
