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This chapter provides a comprehensive picture of how dialogue and negotiations between the Irish and the British led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Here Michael Lillis describes his relationship with British official David Goodall and the process of engagement that led to agreement
This chapter details the experiences and efforts of a key political player in the peace process. Importantly, it also explores the role of women in an ostensibly male environment, how decision-making was influenced, how relations were developed, and questions what qualities and differences women brought to the peace process.
This chapter explains how the decommissioning debate was conducted and how the Irish influenced republican thinking on the issue by working with leaders on statements. It also focuses on how leverage was brought to bear on this problem through intense engagement and the building of trust.
This chapter highlights the importance of strategic direction in negotiations and how convergent political positions were created and informed by an ethos of inclusivity. It also looks at the importance of deadlines in a peace process.
This chapter explores the period of the Sunningdale Agreement and how the Irish Government sought to influence Sunningdale and deal with its aftermath in the wake of unionist intransigence.
This chapter elaborates on the impact of the Anglo-Irish Agreement and how the Irish worked in Belfast to create closer ties with the British by monitoring and assessing policing and justice issues and raising questions about possible discrimination and anti-equality activities.
This chapter analyses how specific individuals who are deemed vulnerable to radicalisation are governed. It articulates Prevent as a targeted, counter-radicalisation programme, most clearly expressed through the Channel project. Channel functions through identifying individuals deemed vulnerable to becoming violent, through identifying the ‘vulnerability indicators’ they display in the present. Channel thus acts as an institutional space to make visible and then intervene into performances of identity that are read as constituting a potential threat. In so doing, it invokes and reworks a pastoral power of care. This power seeks to produce the truth of the individual through interpreting the signs they display in the present. Once identified, intervention is required to bring the individual back to a ‘secure’ identity.
The concluding chapter returns to the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair, demonstrating how it epitomises the mobilisation of the power identified in the book. The chapter situates Prevent as central to understanding contemporary academic and political debates regarding security, identity, community and the expression of politics in the UK. Further, it locates Prevent as central to an emerging security paradigm that seeks to map and secure the future, and is mobilised outside of traditional security architectures, notably through pastoral forms of power. In doing so, it outlines an analysis and a research agenda that is crucial to understanding the present and future of security policy in the UK.
How can potential future terrorists be identified? Forming one of the four
pillars of the United Kingdom’s counter-terrorism strategy CONTEST, Prevent
seeks to answer, and act on, this question. Occupying a central role in security
debates post-9/11, Prevent is concerned with understanding and tackling
radicalisation. It carries the promise of early intervention into the lives of
those who may be on a pathway to violence.
This book offers an innovative
account of the Prevent policy, situating it as a novel form of power that has
played a central role in the production and the policing of contemporary British
identity. Drawing on interviews with those at the heart of Prevent’s
development, the book provides readers with an in-depth history and
conceptualisation of the policy. The book demonstrates that Prevent is an
ambitious new way of thinking about violence that has led to the creation of a
radical new role for the state: tackling vulnerability to radicalisation.
Foregrounding the analytical relationship between security, identity and
temporality in Prevent, this book situates the policy as central to contemporary
identity politics in the UK. Detailing the history of the policy, and the
concepts and practices that have been developed within Prevent, this book
critically engages with the assumptions on which they are based and the forms of
power they mobilise.
In providing a timely history and analysis of British
counter-radicalisation policy, this book will be of interests to students and
academics interested in contemporary security policy and domestic responses to
the ‘War on Terror’.
This chapter demonstrates that Prevent produces an account of future violence by discursively producing certain performances of identity as ‘vulnerable’ to radicalisation due to their alienation from ‘Britishness’ and ‘British values’. It is therefore through understanding and ordering identities in the present that processes of becoming violent in the future can be conceptualised and intervened into. Analysed through a post-structuralist framework, this discursive positioning can be understood as a set of productive practices; it is through the security act that alienation from ‘Britishness’ is made manifest. ‘Britishness’ and ‘British values’ are thus produced as secure and securing; they are normalised, while that which is produced as external is rendered threatening and, therefore, in need of intervention. Prevent, therefore, establishes a boundary between those identities deemed secure, those that are contained within a ‘normalised Britishness’, and those deemed threatening, on account of the potential they may contain. The problematic of Prevent therefore brings together questions of temporality, security and identity, producing and then securing the threat of the future through an analysis of performances of identity in the present.