Global Frictions: A Seminar Series hosted by the Centre for Global Research, presents, 'Resistance is Useless? The Globalisation of State Crime and the Denial of History'. A panel discussion featuring Paul Battersby, Jude McCulloch, Louise Boon-Kuo and Georgina Heydon.Are we witnessing a narrowing and a hardening of the arteries of political liberty globally? Within states wrestling with the challenges of terrorism and transnational crime, new forensic techniques of surveillance and prediction threaten the individual liberties upon which democratic societies at least are founded. The words we write (or speak), the websites we visit, the friends we make, the causes we support, and the things we buy, create digital footprints in the global data-sphere that allegedly betray idiosyncrasies that can be used to predict our future achievements and intent. This panel examines how the lines between who is a domestic criminal and an international threat are becoming blurred as states try to adapt to a changing security environment. In the criminal justice sphere, as the focus for this discussion, this logic presents as “pre-crime”, the notion that criminal tendencies can be identified from behavioural or even genetic traits, and criminals apprehended before a crime is committed. In the global security sphere, strategic responses to terrorism fall victim to an intellectual sclerosis that categorises all forms of armed struggle by non-state armed actors as terror threats, save where these “criminals” serve the interests of a powerful state benefactor. This hardening of the global mind negates creative avenues for dialogue, negotiation and for the resolution of conflict, at home and abroad. Yet it is states that possess the clearest motives and the most extensive organisational resources with which to test the limits of law, transgress international norms, and bend law to suit their purposes. This panel presentation broadens the scope of global unlawfulness to accommodate the actions, and failings, of states and their agents and asks, to what end does all this lead us?