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This chapter develops an account of how Prevent manages problematic spaces. Notably, this represents the conflation of community cohesion work and Prevent. While community cohesion develops separately to Prevent, a discursive reading of cohesion and Prevent texts show how the two become conjoined as a way of thinking about, and governing, threatening communal environments. Prevent also contains a focus on problematic institutions such as schools and prisons wherein extremism could take hold. Both rely on an analysis that understands an alienation from ‘Britishness’ and ‘British values’ to represent a threat which can be managed by intervening into the spaces in which radicalisation occurs. In order to manage these spaces, a governmental approach is invoked, wherein through intervening into the circulation of identities, it is presumed that less threatening identities can be generated. Yet it also pushes beyond Foucault’s articulation of this modality of power, seeking not just to regulate flows, but to actively intervene to promote ‘British’ identifications.
This chapter draws together the previous chapters to establish Prevent as a form of power that has played a key role in producing and policing contemporary British identities. It argues that this diagram enacts its own political geography, producing an account of identities as secure or risky based upon their coherence, or not, with a ‘British’ identity, and then seeking to act on those identities produced as alienated from, or outside of, this ‘normalised Britishness’. Read as an abstract diagram, the power Prevent mobilises need not be reduced to a focus on Muslim identity, and is translatable beyond its specific genesis. It then demonstrates the consequences this function of power has for the expression of politics in the UK, arguing it radicalises the relation of security and identity in the UK. In seeking to intervene early, it extends the scope of who must be secured (as signs of potential to violence must be managed) and who is responsible for such security (as all must now bear responsibility for identifying such signs).
The introduction begins by narrating the ‘Trojan Horse’ scandal that engulfed Birmingham education in 2014. Identifying the anxiety surrounding Trojan Horse as being the introduction and intensification of an Islam-informed ethos into the schools, it highlights an analysis which claims this ethos will leave children in these schools ‘vulnerable to radicalisation’, a claim which could not have been made without the development of the Prevent strategy. The book positions this conceptual link drawn between identity, security and temporality as central to Prevent, with the Trojan Horse situated as an exemplar of the function of power that Prevent has mobilised in responding to the problematic of radicalisation, a function of power that the rest of the book will go on to outline. After outlining the key claims made in the book, the introduction then outlines the theoretical and methodological approach taken. It discusses the approach taken to the interviews as well as the Foucauldian concepts of problematisation, assemblage and diagram, outlining how they will be used to shape both the argument and the structure of the book. The introduction then concludes by providing an account of this structure.
Drawing heavily on the original interviews conducted during the research, this chapter provides a comprehensive account of the history of the Prevent policy. This chapter identifies the key discursive and organisational shifts that have occurred within the development of Prevent, periodising Prevent into three distinct phases: 2001–6; 2007–10; and 2011–15. It demonstrates that the changes to Prevent reflect an underlying debate that sits at the heart of the policy: should Prevent focus on those at imminent risk of radicalisation? Or should the focus be broader, engaging with the ideas and values of communities that may justify and enable violent extremism? A security and an identity strand. The debate between these positions, narrated in the interviews and policy documents, represents the conventional narrative of Prevent, where, at times, the strands are brought together, and at times, it is their separation that is advocated.
This chapter demonstrates that the anlaysis of chapter 1 has been, historically, reproduced across much of the academic literature on Prevent. This literature, it will be argued, often sees the ‘solution’ to Prevent as the separation of its security and identity strands. It therefore positions the two strands as ‘separable’, failing to go beyond the questions that the policy itself asks. It can thus be argued that the academic literature, even when critical, has failed to develop an account of Prevent that conceptually grasps the relationship between security and identity established in the policy. This chapter then analyses two approaches to Prevent, emergent within the literature, that provide a means of moving beyond this position: first, an approach that argues Prevent has produced Muslims in the UK as a ‘suspect community’, and second, an approach that argues Prevent represents a strategy of counter-insurgency.
This chapter starts to challenge the narrative introduced in chapters 1 and 2, and establishes the central relation within Prevent between security and temporality. It argues that Prevent represents a novel ambition for the state: early intervention into processes of becoming violent. It thus intervenes within conditions of uncertainty, in that it is not certain whether such an individual would go on to participate in violence or any other illegal act. Engaging with the emergent academic literature in this area, the chapter argues that such intervention necessarily acts within conditions of uncertainty. This in turn requires discursive and institutional mechanisms that make such a threat knowable and actionable. The term preclusive is introduced here as a general term that emphasises this relation between security and temporality, making clear that all acts of securing are necessarily productive of a future threat they then preclusively act on to mediate. The chapter then demonstrates how the concept of radicalisation fulfils this function for Prevent, identifying potential future violence in the present.
This chapter focuses upon the Baltic States' alignment with European Union (EU) initiatives relating to controlling legal and combating illegal transfers of arms and military equipment. It begins by commenting upon the challenges posed by the illicit arms trade in the post-Cold War era. The chapter provides a summary of the EU's main efforts to harmonise export control legislation and co-ordinate responses to the illicit arms trade. Assessments by the Commission and the Council of Europe's Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) have highlighted a number of general concerns with corruption, experience and resources, which could impact upon their ability to uncover attempted diversions and arms brokering activities. Combating illicit trafficking and preventing the diversion of arms and strategic goods to the international illicit arms trade requires multi-lateral co-operation and degrees of transparency. A considerable number of measures had been adopted to tackle the proliferation and trafficking of illicit arms.
At their summit on the western Balkans in Thessaloniki in June 2003, European Union (EU) leaders declared: 'Fragmentation and divisions along ethnic lines are incompatible with the European perspective, which should act as a catalyst for addressing problems within the region'. This chapter is based on secondary sources on Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (B-H). In B-H an amoral approach was adopted, notably by the UK, based on minimising intervention, particularly by refusing to commit troops to a peace-enforcing role. B-H might seem a more successful power-sharing case than Northern Ireland, in as much as the State institutions, however dysfunctional, have at least been in being ever since the Dayton accords. In Macedonia importantly, interethnic dialogue after the outbreak of civil conflict could be presented instead, as Brussels was keen to do, as an integral part of the path to eventual EU membership, via an Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA).
An appearance in a political cartoon can provide leaders or interest groups welcome recognition. Actors in cartoons are identified in one of the three ways: through personification, symbolic representation or implication. As a study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, cartoons were coded along nationalist lines, using state symbolism and political leaders as identifiers. Israeli or Palestinian characters seen to be sanctioning or engaging in violence were coded as enemies. What one notices when coding Israeli and Palestinian cartoons is the sheer variety of enemy images used. Beasts, barbarians and bugs are only a few of the derogatory pictures that appeared. S. Keen devised his classification by looking at the Western propaganda produced in the first half of the twentieth century. This classification resulted in ten enemy archetypes: aggressor, faceless threat, enemy of God, barbarian, imperialist, criminal or rogue actor, sadist, rapist-infanticide, vermin-beasts and death incarnate.
Several scholars have attempted to tackle the definitional ambiguity of political cartoons. Cartoons focused on the action of the Middle Eastern countries, leaders or populations were coded as dealing with regional issues. Far from being a single-issue conflict, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is plagued by a multiplicity of insecurities. Israeli and Palestinian cartoons respond to diplomatic initiatives and outbursts of violence, despite dramatic differences in political freedoms, economic structures and social norms. Every Israeli and Palestinian cartoon pertaining to the conflict was coded either as expressing a positive or negative mood. The issues over which conflicts are waged are essential for understanding the nature of resolution. Acceptable borders for a future Palestinian state largely depend on the prominence of religious, security or demographic fears. Demographic fears mean that land with large population centres is least desirable.