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Introduction Once extremism has been countered, what will the world look like? This is, obviously, an important question. That a counter-extremism strategy should know exactly what it is hoping to achieve – the kind of world it is attempting to build – appears common sense. Yet, interestingly, while counter-extremism strategies proliferate around the world, it is fascinating to note how poorly defined both extremism and counter-extremism remain. If one cannot define what one is attempting to counter, how can one claim to have succeeded? Two years after
inter-state institution at a global level, tasked with the legal capacity to produce, shape and enforce international norms on states. By focusing on the Security Council as a context of (global) knowledge and (legal) norms production, this chapter highlights how the organ had a central role in the internationalisation of the discourse and practices to counter extremism. The fact that it adopted and reproduced the new language of extremism unproblematically had several consequences. First, the UN body gave a further impetus to this shift in the discourse providing
Recent years have seen the proliferation of discourses surrounding extremism and related terms. Encountering Extremism offers readers the opportunity to interrogate extremism through a plethora of theoretical perspectives, and to explore counter-extremism as it has materialised in plural local contexts. Through offering a critical interrogation along these two planes – the theoretical and the local – Encountering Extremism presents a unique, in-depth and critical analysis of a profoundly important subject. This book seeks to understand, and expose the implications of, a fundamental problematic: how should scholars and strategists alike understand the contemporary shift from counter-terrorism to counter-extremism?
Starting with a genealogical reflection on the discourse and practices of extremism, the book brings together authors examining the topic of extremism, countering extremism and preventing extremism from different theoretical perspectives, such as critical terrorism studies, postcolonialism and gender studies. It then turns to analyses of the specific consequences of this new discourse in international and local contexts such as the United Nations, Nigeria, Tunisia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Spain.
This chapter introduces a unique case of the vulnerability-minority-extremism configuration in the context of counter-extremism policy. Virtually all studies in the field of extremism, at least in the Anglophone world, deploy the term ‘vulnerability’ to mean susceptibility to radicalisation resulting into extremism and terrorism, which
From countering terrorism to countering extremism: wider discourse, same problems? The term extremism has thoroughly permeated counter-terrorism discourses and policies. The word is currently widely employed across the security sector and it has become the ‘explanatory core’ of understandings of terrorism and radicalisation ( Fernández de MosteyrÃn and Limón López, 2016 , p. 806). In contemporary discourse, extremism has almost become synonymous with terrorism, to the point that, at times, the words are used interchangeably ( Kundnani and Hayes, 2018 , p. 2
and Tsui, 2016 ). More specifically, during the Obama presidency, terms such as extremist , extremism and violent extremism were adopted to replace phrases related to the war on terror and were particularly utilised by officials to interpret the threats posed by al Qaida and ISIS because these groups were the focus of President Obama’s counter-extremism initiatives. The discursive shift of US counter-terrorism, in part, illustrates Obama’s determination to change his predecessor’s controversial foreign and security policies, which had been argued against and
, universities are increasingly participating in state violence (e.g. enforcing immigration checks on students and staff as well as implementing counter-extremism policies like Prevent). Such hostile  measures are weaved into the structures of these institutions so seamlessly that they are now considered the norm. There is a particular violence present in these bureaucratic policies and procedures that we are told to just follow: as we explore in this chapter, it is one of the ways we refuse to be complicit. Refusal is also about the interpersonal and creating boundaries
performance. I have received many invitations which similarly reduce me to the performance of ‘speaking Muslim woman’ devoid of my politics and I decline them all, but they do, nonetheless, gall me. Most recently I was bemused to receive an email from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a counter-extremism, policy-advising and advocacy think tank9 – a sector I have repeatedly (and vocally) critiqued because of its dependence on the hugely flawed notion of ‘extremism’ as a ‘system of belief’,10 a premise which leads to violence being essentialised into groups of
the renewed focus on extremism through the Extremism Task Force in 2013, the Counter-Extremism strategy in 2015, and the positioning of extremism as a key strategic priority in the 2018 CONTEST strategy, this clear separation of identity and security within the policy is troubled. It represents a recognition that separating a focus on the perceived causes of violent extremism from action to tackle radicalisation was problematic, bringing questions of identity back into the Home Office, alongside Prevent’s explicit security
In times of national security, scholars and activists who hail from the communities under suspicion attempt to draw readers and listeners to the complexity of the world we inhabit. For those who campaigned against the SUS law in the 1980s, when young Black men were being routinely stopped in the streets, the wave of counter-terrorism legislation and policy that exists today will be very familiar. Similarly, recent discussions about the impact of drill music in the culture of young Black men has drawn questions around the ways in which they should be securitised, with senior police calling for the use of terrorism legislation against them. In this environment, when those who study and have lived alongside the communities who are at the scrutiny of the state raise questions about the government, military and police policy, they are often shut down as terrorist-sympathisers, or apologists for gang culture. In such environments, there is an expectation on scholars and activists to condemn what society at large fears. This volume is about how that expectation has emerged alongside the normalisation of racism, and how these writers choose to subvert the expectations raised on them, as part of their commitment to anti-racism.