The inescapable future of AI-enabled security: Imagining future terrorism and counterterrorism in UN technocratic governance

Abstract

This article examines how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is imagined and narrated in relation to terrorism and counterterrorism through two policy reports published jointly by the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Centre and the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute. Drawing on the concept of Sociotechnical Imaginaries (SIs) and bridging Science and Technology Studies with Critical Security and Terrorism Studies, the article unpacks how AI, terrorism, and counterterrorism are discursively co-constructed. It argues that the reports contribute to the construction of a specific emerging SI: one in which AI is framed as inevitable and transformative, terrorism as increasingly technological, and AI-enabled counterterrorism as both necessary and morally imperative. Through this imaginary, speculative futures and imminent threats are mobilised to legitimise precautionary and potentially exceptional responses. By invoking scientific authority, expert consensus, and the language of technical neutrality, these UN organs perform as a technocratic authority, presenting its guidance as apolitical while reinforcing a particular vision of global security governance. The article thus contributes to the literature by showing how imaginaries of AI are produced, stabilised, and circulated within international security institutions, and by revealing their wider political effects, including the depoliticisation of technological choices and the normalisation of AI-enabled counterterrorism as an inevitable future.