A discussion with Azadeh Shahshahani and Raqib Hameed Naik

November 19, 2025

The word “terrorism” casts a long shadow, implying threats of large-scale political violence and invoking the national security state. In the U.S., framing an intervention or set of policies as “counterterrorism” is a political maneuver that conveys a particular vision of “security” rooted in law enforcement or military intervention and that demonizes its targets as dangerous others. As such, counterterrorism funding and frameworks entrench a specific kind of othering rooted in the specter of racialized danger, and these policies have long been weaponized to target, disrupt, and dismantle social justice movements. This may happen with bans on “material support” sweeping so broadly as to ensnare nonprofits and human rights organizations engaged in strategic coordination with dissenting voices abroad, with controls on speech and publication and participation in public debate, and with direct criminalization through arrest, prosecution, detention, incarceration, and military or political violence. 

For the sixth session of our Criminal Law as a Tool of Authoritarian Control speaker series we will be joined by Azadeh Shahshahani of Project South and Raqib Hameed Naik of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate to pull back the mask of “counterterrorism” frameworks, with examples from domestic and international contexts. Our speakers will describe their work with community-based legal and policy organizations to examine the far-reaching role of “counterterrorism” in political suppression of marginalized people and social justice movements—in particular, the prosecution of protestors and dismantling of bail support in the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, GA; the targeting of Muslim and Palestinian organizers by the U.S. and Israel; and the targeting of Muslim organizers and human rights organizations in Kashmir. We will discuss whether this net-widening of counterterrorism is merely incidental to counterterrorism policies or, rather, instrumental and intentionally interwoven into their design, and how counterterrorism frameworks enable authoritarian creep even in self-professed democracies.

Speakers

Azadeh ShahshahaniAzadeh Shahshahani, Legal and Advocacy Director with Project South, advances a practice of movement lawyering, focused on confronting state repression and dismantling systems of surveillance, incarceration, and deportation.  Azadeh has organized for two decades to protect and defend migrants and Black and Muslim communities from systemic lslamophobia, xenophobia, and anti-Black racism. She also provides support to social justice movements in the Global South, from Brazil to Palestine. Azadeh is a past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She currently serves on the Advisory Council of the American Association of Jurists. She is the author or editor of several groundbreaking human rights reports as well as law review articles and book chapters focused on movement lawyering, immigrants’ rights, surveillance of Muslim-Americans, and using the international human rights framework as a tool for liberation. Her writings have appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, MSNBC, Time Magazine, Boston Review, Slate, and Los Angeles Times, among others. Azadeh received her JD from the University of Michigan Law School where she was Article Editor for The Michigan Journal of International Law. She also has a Master’s in Modern Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of the Shanara M. Gilbert Human Rights Award from the Society of American Law Teachers, the US Human Rights Network Human Rights Movement Builder Award, the Emory Law School Outstanding Leadership in the Public Interest Award, the University of Georgia Law School Equal Justice Foundation Public Interest Practitioner Award, and the Emory University MLK Jr. Community Service Award, among several other recognitions. She has also been recognized as an Abolitionist by the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University & the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives. 

Raqib Hameed NaikRaqib Hameed Naik is the Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), a research and policy organization based in Washington, D.C. Previously, Naik founded hate tracker HindutvaWatch.org, a real-time data set of human rights abuses, and India Hate Lab, which studies hate speech targeting India's religious minorities in the digital and offline realms. Naik also serves as a Fellow at Bard College’s Human Rights Project and at the Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

Links to resources shared during the event

 


The Criminal Law as a Tool of Authoritarian Control speaker series is organized by Katy Naples-Mitchell, Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and  Sandra Susan Smith, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice (HKS); Faculty Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management; Professor of Sociology (FAS).