Ten Years on – the Triumph of Securitisation over Inclusive Citizenship in Britain?

In hindsight, we see that the 7/7 London bombings of July 2005 dramatically influenced political and media discourse around the position of minority communities, particularly Muslims, in Britain. For many academic commentators, the resulting Prevent counter-terrorism strategy that has focussed exclusively on Muslim communities seen as both ‘risky and at risk’ (Heath-Kelly, 2013), was consistent with an Islamophobic   policy approach first developed in the wake of the 2001 northern riots (Kundnani, 2014). That post- riot policy shift towards community cohesion and  attacks on ‘multiculturalism’ seemingly paved the way for Prevent’s yet more overt and securitised focus on the problematic other, British Muslims.

However, this paper draws on case study research projects carried out i since 2001 (Thomas, 2011; 2012),which examined both the perceptions of young people focussed on by these policy agendas and of the ground-level practitioners, such as youth and community workers, charged with enacting cohesion and Prevent policies. The paper argues that state policy since 2001 has not been linear or consistent in relation to citizenship and identity for young British Muslims. Rather, it argues that community cohesion, as enacted at ground-level, initially offered a ‘re-balancing’ of multiculturalism (Meer and Modood, 2009) towards greater concern with commonality and more complex understandings of identifications. Prevent, both in theory and in practice, has contradicted this and has progressively side-lined cohesion (Thomas, forthcoming) to the point where the approach of  ‘policed muilticulturalism’ (Ragazzi, 2012) and securitisation has triumphed and the national state is officially indifferent towards minority integration and cohesion.