Book review: V Sentas, Traces of Terror: Counter-Terrorism Law, Policing, and Race
| Author | Tony Jefferson |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480614543746 |
| Published date | 01 February 2015 |
| Date | 01 February 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 137
justice practitioners. This shift, Ward argues, effectively provides a rational—instead of a
race-based or explicitly racist—basis for the exclusion and punishment of black youth and
is far removed from the citizen-building efforts to which early juvenile justice systems
aspired.
The Black Child-Savers will no doubt become a classic in the field of juvenile justice,
read alongside Anthony Platt’s (1977) The Child Savers and other important works in the
literature. The book is also an important history of race and racial formation. In the final
pages of the book, Ward hints at the emergence of yet a new wave of black child-savers.
The book ends before the Obama era begins, but one cannot help wondering how Ward
would make sense of the justice-related reform efforts of President Barack Obama and
Attorney General Eric Holder. Do their efforts reflect the black child-saving sentiments
of the past? The first step to answering this question is to revisit the history of the black
child-saving moment, a task one can now take on because of Ward’s monumental effort
to fill a gap in the history of race and US juvenile justice.
Reference
Platt A (1977) The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
V Sentas, Traces of Terror: Counter-Terrorism Law, Policing, and Race, Oxford University Press:
Oxford, 2014; 331 pp.: 9780199674633, £65.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Tony Jefferson, University of Keele, UK
Back in the day, when police–black relations in the UK was a much contested topic
within criminology, and Gramsci and hegemony tripped off the tongue more readily than
Foucault and governmentality, the issue, put crudely, boiled down to police racism ver-
sus black criminality. In other words, was the notorious over-policing of black youth in
the 1970s and 1980s a product of the discriminatory practices of police officers for whom
being black meant potential criminal (mugger or drug user, principally), or was it the
justified result of the greater propensity of black youth to be involved in crime? I was
constantly reminded of that debate, oversimplified as it was, when reading Traces of
Terror, and found myself asking what precisely is new about the policing of terror in
contemporary Australia, the book’s subject matter, and how does the re-introduction of
Gramscian notions of ‘common sense’ and ‘hegemony’ help us to think about it now?
Having written a 300 page book on the topic, Victoria Sentas presumably thinks some-
thing of importance has changed in the transition from policing black crime to policing
Muslim terror; but, I remain unsure quite as to what that is.
The book’s specific focus is counter-terrorism law and policing in post-9/11 Australia,
and its impact on particular ethnic minority communities. It aims to show how ‘counter-
terrorism law and policing reflect and produce a common sense that Muslims and tar-
geted ethnic minorities are its proper subjects and should be policed’ (p. 5), how these
same processes also divide these groups into ‘moderates, extremists, or ethno-national-
ists’ (p. 5) and how all this ‘operates as a particular type of racial governance’ (p. 5),
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