Preemptive Measures Against Radicalization and Urban Democratic Innovation

Extremism and terrorist attacks cause great anxiety among authorities in European cities (Vermeulen 2014). The current discussion about Syria fighters has further proliferated these anxieties. Radicalization, the presumed explanation for this threat,  is understood as an unknown but potentially catastrophic societal phenomenon. Preemptive measures are considered  as an adequate and indispensable anticipatory security practice to counter the threat (De Goede et al. 2014). Preemptive security measures on the national level  are for instance arrests of individuals before they have committed crimes, deportation and/or the removal of the nationality of suspected extremists. On the local level we might understand establishing ad-hoc policy partnerships with local Islamic organisations as a form of preemption (Vermeulen and Bovenkerk 2012). This paper looks at the way in which these partnerships can be considered within the framework of incident driven democratic innovation. In a context in which local Islamic organizations have no opportunities for policy input it might be that these partnerships, even  those that are not public, change the rules of the political game. This paper, focusing on London, Berlin, Amsterdam and Antwerp raises the question to what extent these partnerships indeed present Islamic organizations – and through them their constituencies -  opportunities for policy input? And if so to what extent are these changes permanent and how does this differ between contexts? And finally, to what extent do these local preemptive measures result in the innovation of urban systems of democratic governance?