Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article explores geographical and epistemological shifts in the deployment of the UK Prevent strategy, 2007–2017. Counter-radicalisation policies of the Labour governments (2006–2010) focused heavily upon resilience-building activities in residential communities. They borrowed from historical models of crime prevention and public health to imagine radicalisation risk as an epidemiological concern in areas showing a 2% or higher demography of Muslims. However, this racialised and localised imagination of pre-criminal space was replaced after the election of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010. Residential communities were then de-emphasised as sites of risk, transmission and pre-criminal intervention. The Prevent Duty now deploys counter-radicalisation through national networks of education and health-care provision. Localised models of crime prevention (and their statistical, crime prevention epistemologies) have been de-emphasised in favour of big data inflected epistemologies of inductive, population-wide “safeguarding”. Through the biopolitical discourse of “safeguarding vulnerable adults”, the Prevent Duty has radically reconstituted the epidemiological imagination of pre-criminal space, imagining that all bodies are potentially vulnerable to infection by radicalisers and thus warrant surveillance.
Highlights
Counter-radicalisation policies of the Labour governments (2006–2010) focused heavily upon resilience-building activities in residential communities. They borrowed from historical models of crime prevention and public health to imagine radicalisation risk as an epidemiological concern in areas showing a 2% or higher demography of Muslims
Through the biopolitical discourse of “safeguarding vulnerable adults”, the Prevent Duty has radically reconstituted the epidemiological imagination of precriminal space, imagining that all bodies are potentially vulnerable to infection by radicalisers and warrant surveillance
In studying the counter-radicalisation practices which constitute the UK’s Prevent strategy, academics have explored the deployment of pre-crime interventions, targeted disruption, rehabilitation, and risk assessment upon individuals and groups (Elshimi 2015; De Goede and Simon 2012; Gutowski 2011; Heath-Kelly 2013; Kundnani 2009; Lindekilde 2012)
Summary
The Labour governments translated criminal prevention and community cohesion models into counterterrorism, but reworked them around a different calculative rationality: statistical prediction was replaced by the imagination of precriminal space and epidemiological vulnerability attached to race This endorsement of pre-emption and pre-crime was to become even more pronounced in the subsequent Coalition and Conservative eras. The Prevent Duty (the legal duty to report suspicions of radicalisation) has operated in all schools, health-care premises and universities since at least 2015, but in priority areas since 2011 This has split the administration of the Prevent Strategy between localised community focused engagement (which works from an assumption about suspicious locales and identities) and the national level (which acts upon the whole of population). It would befit the future of the Critical Terrorism Studies project to study the intertwining of social care structures with counterterrorism, as well as the blurring of digital and non-digital epistemologies of surveillance and calculation
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