Preventing radicalization in European cities: An urban geopolitical question

Abstract

With the intensification of attacks in European cities since 2014, preventing radicalization has become the main security strategy for fighting ‘terrorism’ in Europe and beyond. While the concern with radicalization in security policy was due to a realization that European cities are not just the target of but also increasingly the ‘breeding ground’ of terrorism, less attention has been paid to how radicalization prevention has changed the relations between European cities and war. Debates in critical security studies have remained a-spatial for the most part, focused on either the national or international scales, while the question of radicalization has not yet become a topic of scrutiny in the literature on urban geopolitics. Addressing this lacuna, I engage with the policy debates at the EU, urban, and regional levels as well as the role of the European Forum for Urban Security that eventually led to the first EU Mayors' conference on terrorism and radicalization in Brussels in March 2018. The core observation here is that, rather than another form of national security, radicalization prevention is an extension of counterinsurgency in European cities. This extension of the liberal way of war inside Europe is also accompanied by an increasing focus on urban geopolitics of danger, one that is the relational outcome of the assumed ungovernability of the Other at the urban and international scales and which blurs spaces of liberal peace and war. These developments point to the gradual incorporation of radicalization prevention into the processes of urban governance.