Tuesday, June 25, 2013
5.55 (PC Hoofthuis)
After the 7.7 bombings, the British government introduced measures aimed at preventing people from becoming terrorists. The Prevent strategy was premised on the fact that the “prevention of violent extremism” required the active involvement of the communities which constituted the core of Al Qaeda recruitment: the Muslim communities. The latter were encouraged to apply for project-funding at the local authority level, through the Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) programme led by the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG), and to report individuals that may be vulnerable to recruitment to their local institutions such as police, health or education services, through the Channel programme. Both programmes were sharply criticised by grassroots associations, major Muslim organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain, and leading think tanks. They argued that, by allocating Prevent funding to local areas according to the proportion of Muslims rather than based on actual threat level and by providing blanket-funding to Muslim organisations, including for broader social projects, these programmes had led to the “securitisation” of the Muslim communities, that is the construction of these communities as a security threat. Such mobilisation was instrumental in bringing about a review of the Prevent strategy by a CLG Select Committee in 2010, and shaped the 2011 version of Prevent, which explicitly excluded wider community cohesion projects from Prevent. This paper aims at questioning the competing processes of “securitisation” and “desecuritisation” at work in Prevent, that is how the mobilisation of different actors contributed to constructing or deconstructing the Muslim communities as a security threat. It is argued that the evolution of the Prevent strategy, from Prevent 2 (2009) to Prevent 3 (2011) is evidence of these shifting power relations.
