This volume was inspired by a debate at a symposium in Singapore in 2004 between David Dyzenhaus, who attended the symposium in person, and Oren Gross, who spoke by teleconference. Their debate was later published in a volume I had the privilege of co-editing with Michael Hor and Kent Roach, Global Anti-Terrorism Law and Policy, published by Cambridge University Press in 2005. Reflecting on their debate, I became more and more convinced that the legal-theoretical issues they were confronting were likely to become the defining theoretical issues of our generation, and would preoccupy legal theorists for years, and probably decades, to come – in much the same way that the atrocities of World War II were the backdrop against which much of the subsequent twentieth-century jurisprudence developed. The more I reflected on the Gross–Dyzenhaus debate, the more determined I was to provide a forum in which the parameters of this debate could be fully examined, critiqued and challenged by a group of eminent legal, political and social theorists. And so the idea for this project was conceived.

I am especially grateful to David Dyzenhaus and Oren Gross for their enthusiasm from the very start, when I first broached the idea with them in late 2005. Their continued support for this project has been crucial to its completion. Convening an international symposium requires significant financial support, and the funding for this project came from a generous grant from the Ministry of Education, administered by the National University of Singapore (NUS).