Counter-radicalisation policy and the securing of British identity

The politics of Prevent

Thomas Martin

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526140111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Seguridad nacional

This book offers an innovative account of Prevent, Britain's counter-radicalisation strategy, 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. 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.

1

The (problematic) history of Prevent

The attacks of 9/11 constitute one of those moments in history that divides before and after. They led to a declaration of a ‘War on Terror’ from George W. Bush, President of the United States, on 20 September 2001, a call to arms that would be answered by many European states, the UK included. The threat was understood as an ‘Islamist’ terrorism, a perverse reading of the Muslim faith whose proponents spanned the world.¹ Soon after the attacks, the United States, with the aid of key allies, invaded Afghanistan on the basis that the Taliban, who ruled the country, had given shelter to Osama bin Laden, who was held ultimately responsible for the attacks. This would be followed in 2003 by the invasion of Iraq by the United States and other members of the ‘coalition of the willing’. Over the next decade, the War on Terror would span much of the globe, resulting in a plethora of local, national and transnational conflicts between the forces of Islamist insurgency and terrorism and those opposed to them. The War on Terror was not limited to conflicts abroad. In the aftermath of 9/11, concerns were being raised in the UK’s security establishment that this particular reading of Islam would also be a domestic concern. The attacks of 9/11 had shown that this emerging, global, Islamist violence was willing to target ‘Western’ countries. The fear was that the UK was at risk. This global, networked terrorism rooted in religious conviction and displaying devastating ambition required fresh thinking. The UK would introduce a new counter-terrorism strategy and new legislation in order to tackle Islamist terrorism at home and abroad. Prevent, and the idea that the government should try to stop people becoming terrorists in the first place, represents a key, and increasingly central, element of this response.

This chapter tells the history of the UK’s Prevent policy. First presented to Cabinet in 2003, this chapter details the increasing importance of the policy and its institutional and practical developments. In seeking to stop people becoming radicalised, the Prevent policy represents an ambition that has asked novel questions of the capabilities and role of the state. Yet these questions have proved controversial, and both the purpose and delivery of the policy have been contested within government. Central to these political debates has been the extent to which questions of identity matter for a counter-radicalisation strategy. The purpose of Prevent is to intervene into processes of radicalisation, but does this entail the state should only intervene when people are actively becoming radicalised? Or should the state also try to intervene into the spaces in which ideas that might lead to radicalisation have taken hold? Should the state focus on a narrow security agenda? Or should the focus extend to Muslim communities, and the identities and ideologies they contain?

The Prevent strategy can thus be read as containing two strands: a security-focused strand that emphasises targeted interventions into those vulnerable to radicalisation; and an identity-focused strand that argues the policy must also engage with the identities and values in Muslim communities that may provide a platform for radicalisation. The political debates that have informed the development of the policy, its internal negotiations and self-critiques, that are evident in policy documents, committee reports and the statements made by those developing Prevent, concern how these two strands can and should relate. At times they are brought together. At times it is their separation that is advocated. These different approaches have led to transformations of Prevent’s objectives and implementation. This chapter narrates the story of these debates as told by those responsible for the policy and the policy documents themselves.

In doing so, this chapter provides the first of two different discursive readings of Prevent given in this book. Here, the book is concerned with the political debates regarding the policy, and policymaker narratives regarding what the policy can and should do. This first reading of Prevent is important as it establishes the key assumption that has informed understanding of the Prevent policy. The assumption running throughout the policy is that these two strands are separable; there is a political decision to be made between whether Prevent should be security-focused or identity-focused. The story that emerges from policymakers and the policy documents is of the renegotiations of these strands. Often, critics have argued that for Prevent to work, it needs to focus on security and not questions of identity. Moreover, as will be shown in chapter 2, the academic literature reproduces these debates. Therefore, as the book will demonstrate, understandings of the Prevent policy often fail to go beyond an analysis that sees the key political question to be one of whether the policy should focus on a tight security remit, or intervene more broadly into the identities and values of the Muslim community. Yet, as this book will argue, this analysis is inadequate. In understanding Prevent as a negotiation between these security and identity strands, it is an analysis that fails to recognise the ways in which the security actions of Prevent are productive of identity. The second reading of Prevent will go on to show, though an analysis of Prevent’s problematisation of threat in chapters 3 and 4, that to distinguish between Prevent’s security and identity interventions is illusory. That, in fact, the problematic of Prevent produces a series of interventions that are productive of both security and identity.

In order to narrate and demonstrate these political debates, this chapter tells the history of Prevent. The policy has gone through three major transformations, which broadly cohere with the first three versions of the UK’s post-9/11 counter-terrorism strategy, ‘CONTEST’, published in 2006, 2009 and 2011. The latest iteration of CONTEST, published in June 2018, builds on the 2011 policy and will be discussed, but it does not represent a significant shift in policy. Using these iterations as a framework, the chapter periodises the development of Prevent, and the relations drawn between its security and identity strands, into three distinct phases. The first covers the initial development of the strategy from 2001 to 2006. In this period, mobilising discourses of community cohesion, Prevent is created as a community relations approach to counter-radicalisation. This approach emphasises the need to work with and through the Muslim community, focusing on the ideologies and values of Muslim communities in the UK. The second period covers the consolidation of the policy in 2007–10. First, it maintains the community relations approach, now clearly located within the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG). Yet it also establishes a targeted, security strand of Prevent, locating within the Home Office a police-led responsibility to identify and act on those vulnerable to radicalisation. The final period is from 2011 to 2018. This iteration separated Prevent’s identity and security elements, claiming that there was no place for broader community initiatives within the policy. Prevent would now be purely focused on individuals vulnerable to radicalisation. Yet, with 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 interventions.

2001–6

CONTEST: the strategic response to 9/11

The story of CONTEST starts with the appointment of Sir David Omand to the position of first Permanent Secretary and Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator at the Cabinet Office in September 2002. The government had spent the last year responding to the shock of 9/11. While that had entailed a new legal apparatus through the Counter-Terrorism Act 2001, it had yet to translate into a fundamental shift in policy. From the vantage point of the Cabinet Office, Omand drew together a team of officials from across government and the intelligence agencies to work on developing a coherent policy approach to counter-terrorism in a post-9/11 world. This group became formalised as an official Cabinet sub-committee (chaired by Omand and reporting to a Ministerial Cabinet Committee chaired by the Home Secretary), and developed the first iteration of CONTEST (interview with Senior Civil Servant).

The CONTEST strategy, from this first iteration, has been formed of four pillars: Protect, Prepare, Pursue and Prevent. Protect is ‘concerned with reducing the vulnerability of the UK and UK interests overseas to a terrorist attack’, which focuses on protecting ‘borders, the critical national infrastructure, and crowded places’ (Home Office, 2006: 22). Prepare seeks to ensure ‘the UK is as ready as it can be for the consequences of a terrorist attack’ through identifying risks and ‘building the capabilities to respond to them’ (Home Office, 2006: 25). Pursue is ‘concerned with reducing the terrorist threat to the UK and to UK interests overseas by disrupting terrorists and their operations’ (Home Office, 2006: 16). This is achieved by making Britain a hostile environment for terrorists, ideally taking the form of prosecution, but also utilising deportation, asset freezing, control orders and the proscription of organisations (Home Office, 2006: 17). Prevent is concerned with ‘tackling the radicalisation of individuals, both in the UK and elsewhere’ (Home Office, 2006: 9). It seeks to understand ‘[t]‌he processes whereby certain experiences and events in a person’s life cause them to become radicalised, to the extent of turning to violence to resolve perceived grievances’ (Home Office, 2006: 9). Pushing beyond the criminal justice framework of Pursue, the intention of the Prevent strand is to identify individuals that represent a potential risk of radicalisation, those who are vulnerable to radicalisation, in order to then act on and minimise the threat they pose.

The central concern of Prevent is therefore stopping people from becoming terrorists. From the beginning, the intelligence community understood that this aspect of the new counter-terrorism strategy would require a focus on British citizens. The concept of ‘homegrown’ terrorism developed in the aftermath of the attacks on the London transport network on 7 July 2005 – the 7/7 attacks. Yet that British citizens might engage in political violence in the name of Islam pre-dates the shock of 7/7, informing the earliest discussions of the new policy. By the late 1990s there was a lot of security activity focused on those in the UK sympathetic to the ideals of groups such as al-Qaeda, and who were demonstrably organising volunteers and money to send overseas (interview with Senior Civil Servant).² With 9/11, it became evident that the possibility of al-Qaeda targeting the ‘West’ was a legitimate concern. By 2003–4, it was demonstrable that attacks on UK soil by UK citizens were being contemplated. This was made abundantly clear with a number of arrests made in March 2004 as a result of Operation Crevice. The plot resulted in the imprisonment of five British citizens, who were found guilty of conspiring to make a fertiliser bomb and had planned to attack targets such as a shopping centre, a nightclub and a gas network. Members of the group had travelled to Pakistan for training and had links to al-Qaeda (see BBC News, 2007). By the time of the 7/7 attacks, the idea of ‘homegrown’ terrorists targeting the UK was ‘completely accepted inside the security community’ (interview with Senior Civil Servant). The question that therefore emerges is why British-born citizens of Islamic faith are willing to engage in this violence? And is it possible to prevent these individuals from going down this path?

Counter-radicalisation as a community relations strategy

While the attacks of 9/11 bring to the fore the threat posed by Islamist terrorists to the UK, the question of Muslim communities and their place within the UK had already been raised by a number of riots in northern mill towns in the summer of 2001.³ Seen to be rooted in inter-cultural tensions between white populations and second- and third-generation Muslim communities, the disturbances led to a critique of the current state of British multiculturalism. It was argued, most notably in a Home Office report led by Professor Ted Cantle, that different ethnic communities had become ‘segregated’, lacking any common identity, with the authors ‘particularly struck by the depth of polarisation of our towns and cities’ (Home Office, 2001a: 9). Different communities living in the same city were, it was claimed, living ‘parallel lives’, lives that ‘do not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap and promote any meaningful interchanges’, with the report concluding there was ‘little wonder that the ignorance about each other’s communities can easily grow into fear, especially where this is exploited by extremist groups determined to undermine community harmony and foster divisions’ (Home Office, 2001a: 9). The policy recommendation is to develop a communities policy based upon an idea of cohesion, bridging the divide between segregated communities in the UK, and that this will require establishing ‘a greater sense of citizenship based on (a few) common principles which are shared and observed by all sections of the community’ (Home Office, 2001a: 10). What emerges is a set of policy discourses that question the alienation and segregation of communities in the UK, with a particular focus on Muslim communities. It is feared that such segregation leads to a lack of common values and the generation of extremism, which in turn may lead to violence. It is this analysis that forms the basis for the argument that Prevent, to be effective, needs to intervene into these broader questions of identity and values. The discourses of community cohesion will be explored more fully in chapter 5.

In this period of Prevent’s development, the importance of this emerging discourse of cohesion is that it starts to influence policymakers who are now concerned about the possibility of homegrown terrorism emerging from Muslim communities in the UK. This analysis of community relations in general, and the Muslim community in particular, is mobilised by the Home Office Select Affairs Committee who, in publishing an influential report – Terrorism and Community Relations – would set the framework for the early years of the Prevent strategy. The report, set up to examine how terrorism had affected community relations in the UK post-9/11, argues that ‘the need to overcome segregation […] and the need for clarity over what it means to be British, are central to the problems discussed in this inquiry’ (Home Affairs Committee, 2005: 61). The concern regarding minority groups, and particularly Muslim communities in the UK, is that when ‘alienation from the wider society is too great, a small number of people will be drawn to extremist interpretations of their faith’ (Home Affairs Committee, 2005: 51). The report states that ‘[q]‌uestions of identity may be inextricably linked with the reasons which may lead a small number of well-educated and apparently integrated young British people to turn to terrorism’ (Home Affairs Committee, 2005: 52).

Preventing people from becoming terrorists is therefore positioned within the wider question of the place of Muslim communities in the UK. It is segregation and alienation from the mainstream of ‘British’ society that represents a concern, generating extremism, that might then lead to terrorism. The report argues that the response to the terrorist threat must not simply be ‘a set of police and judicial powers’, but must also ‘explicitly and specifically set out how British Muslim leaders will be supported in assisting British Muslims in resisting extremist views’ (Home Affairs Committee, 2005: 49). Noting that the Home Office did not reference community cohesion in their submission to the committee, the report suggests that they did ‘not yet appreciate that the implementation of its community cohesion strategy is central to its ability to deal with the community impact of international terrorism’, recommending that links between cohesion and counter-terrorism work be reviewed (Home Affairs Committee, 2005: 33). The report concludes that ‘the Government must engage British Muslims in its anti-terrorist strategy’ (Home Affairs Committee, 2005: 60).

Responding to the report, the Home Office endorses this reading of the relation between questions of Muslim ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of interviewees
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The (problematic) history of Prevent
• 2 The ‘separatist’ literature on Prevent (and the way forward)
• 3 The temporal ambition of Prevent: stopping people becoming terrorists
• 4 Crossing the temporal gap: vulnerability, extremism and the ordering of identities
• 5 Governing threatening environments: community cohesion and problem institutions
• 6 The Channel project: identifying individuals who are vulnerable to radicalisation
• 7 The identity politics of Prevent
• 8 Conclusion
• References
• Index