Making Sense of Violent Extremism

Abstract

In “Making Sense of Security,” J. Benton Heath convincingly argues that the concept of security should be understood as a struggle for epistemic authority. Heath develops a comprehensive typology that helps to understand the processes through which people make sense of the term security, while it also helps identifying the legal and political practices involved. However, as he rightly observes, these approaches to security are “not stable equilibria but rather more like quantum states, in which each type contains the potential for the others.”1 Global counterterrorism law powerfully illustrates this evolution. In particular, the growing field of preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) reveals a flow of security conceptions, including realist, widened, and discursive security. Applying Heath's typology to this field shows that evolving rationales have set in motion normative practices, which are difficult to trace from within a traditional international security law framework. In their relational modes, such practices aim at turning risks into opportunities, thus denoting that one's security is the other's perpetuation of insecurities. The recourse to resilience as a technique of counterterrorism governance that instrumentalizes shared and emerging social identities and practices in order to prevent extremism, contributes to the entrenchment of an ever-expanding security apparatus. But it is precisely by resorting to social life—unpredictable as it is—that resilience becomes a quantum state itself, which bears potential for disruption.