This presentation analyses the major techniques and strategies animating recent political theatre developed in Britain and Australia in response to violations of human rights that have occurred as part of the so-called ‘war on terror’. Within this theatre, intensely localised engagements with immigration and asylum issues, as well as imaginative interrogations of U.S. foreign policy and media propaganda, suggest some of the specificities of global securitisation as it is experienced by (dissenting) citizens of countries whose national interests have been historically entwined with, and sometimes compromised by, American military aggression. The key texts to be examined here are Tricycle Theatre’s docudrama Guantanamo (London, 2004), a penetrating investigation of ‘freedom’ and its Others, and Nigel Jamieson’s Honour Bound (2006), a visceral exploration of (in)justice and torture focused on Australian terror suspect David Hicks, who was imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for almost five years in violation of the Geneva Convention. The discussion will be informed by Ghassan Hage’s concept of ‘phallic democracy’ and recent debates within postcolonial studies about cosmopolitanism and global citizenship.