Countering violent extremism, governmentality and Australian Muslim youth as ‘becoming terrorist’

Abstract

This article explores how a ‘regime of truth’ about Muslim youth has been historically produced through the underlying logic of Australia’s counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism (CVE) policies and practices. The article is divided into three parts. I first look at how the pre-emptive logic of countering the ‘becoming terrorist’ constitutes young Australian Muslims. I then interrogate the way CVE has constituted Australian Muslims as a self-contained space, a governmental population divided between ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’. Lastly, I discuss how CVE operates as a technique of governmentality in the way that it deploys grants programs to foster the ‘conduct of conduct’ of Muslim subjects within this self-contained racialised space. I argue that the central organising logic of community partnership has been the targeting of the conditions of emergence of ‘extremist’ Muslim subjects, thereby guaranteeing the racialisation of Muslim youth as always at-risk, marked with the ‘potential’ of ‘becoming terrorist’.