Social and civic education in an age of extremisms

Since the attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11th 2001, governments, educational and civil society organisations across many nations have engaged with the question of extremism in ways that represent radical change in the relationship between states and their publics. Challenging questions for civic and moral educators around freedom and surveillance, identity and plurality, sustainability and progress, and the normative resources with which to address them have begun to be refracted through a securitised lens (Conroy 2003). At the same time, education systems globally have been subject to pressures from increasing marketisation, rapid policy change, intersecting with rapid population changes brought about by the refugee crisis.

These changes make security and counter-extremism an important focus for educators interested in religion, beliefs and values; concerns about national and ‘Western’ values, as enumerated in many contexts as central components of preventing violent extremism, intersect with concerns about the rise of narrow nationalism globally (Bamber et al. 2018). While formulated in the interests of social cohesion in the context of pluralism, prescriptive values, presented as European (European Union Education Ministers, 2015), British (DfE 2012), Australian (Chavura 2017), are easily co-opted by anti-cosmopolitan rhetoric in the rise of narrow nationalisms across the globe. Under conditions of confusion and complexity, characterised by Sardar (2010) as ‘post-normality’, values educators face a context in which information gaps can quickly give way to moral panics, and be interpreted as security gaps. This is a point which Stonebanks (2019) illustrates in relation to Canadian media discourse around minorities, and which Jerome and Elwick (2019) and Lundie (2019) explore in relation to the Prevent duty in the UK. This environment of panic and risk aversion provides fertile ground for the percolating of techniques of inspection and management derived from policing and security into the education sector, in evidence across the world (Miah 2013; Jøre and Sjöen 2019). Faure Walker (2019) explores the implications of this change on spaces for dialogue in relation to the classroom.

While many theorists have attempted to address the social (West 2016), inter-generational (Thomas 2016) and racial (Miah 2015) dimensions of this new securitisation on young people, this issue of the journal collects together articles which consider the impact on social development and civic education. Opening with a comprehensive review of the existing literature, Jøre and Sjöen (2019) highlight a tension between approaches to counter-extremism education that emphasise civic education, developing resilient citizens and challenging vulnerabilities, and interventionist approaches aimed at desistance and deradicalisation. This distinction continues to arise in the different professional backgrounds of Prevent educators interviewed by Lundie (2019), the policy discourses excavated by Faure Walker (2019), before Halafoff, Lam, and Bouma (2019) reporting a comprehensive study of young people’s social attitudes in Australia, highlighting the importance of learning about others, developing critical and intercultural competences, and challenging exclusive or supremacist narratives.

The articles in this special issue bring into dialogue an emerging literature in the field of education studies and securitisation theory (Gearon 2015; Shirazi 2017; Panjwani and Moulin-Stozek 2017). As Gearon (2019) and Stonebanks (2019) highlight in two very different discursive pieces, securitisation goes beyond counter-terrorism and has deep historical roots; where Gearon highlights the historic dependency of security institutions on universities for their intelligence capabilities, Stonebanks excavates the legacy of colonialism in surveilling minority populations. Taken together, these two critiques remind us that ‘extremism’, security and education are not new arrivals in our civic discourse, but are being brought together in new constellations by policy and media framing.

Drawing on perspectives from Europe, North America and Australia, its contributors explore the consequences of law enforcement and security encroachment on educative spaces and civic pedagogy, while also engaging with the methodological cross-fertilisation which securitisation theory offers for understanding complex changes. Moving beyond the chaos of Sardar’s ‘post-normality’, several contributors make use of the work of the Copenhagen school of security studies (Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde 1998) to make sense of these changes. Buzan posits distinct sectors, each with their own institutional logic; as I have argued elsewhere (Lundie 2017), a shift in logics can be seen in civic education policies, between a focus on what Buzan terms the ‘societal’ sector, concerned with community identities and shared values, and the ‘political’ sector, concerned with the institutions of the state. It is this shift which Jerome and Elwick (2019) map – between a securitised approach to the Prevent duty in UK schools, concerned with safeguarding and reporting, and an educative approach. At the same time as being a duty for policing and surveillance in the classroom, terrorism, extremism and radicalisation also form controversial issues which can be fruitfully discussed in the curriculum (Jerome and Elwick forthcoming). These institutional logics are also at play in the shift which Faure Walker (2019) maps between democratic norms of classroom dialogue and the narrowing language of violence and criminality in the Prevent policy.

Having mapped the contextual constraints of this ‘securitising move’ (Taureck, c.f. Gearon 2019), another common theme to these articles is the role of teacher agency in civic education under a counter-extremism agenda. Jøre and Sjöen (2019) draw on the work of Gert Biesta to understand subjectification – the process of becoming agentive – as a situated process, while Jerome and Elwick (2019) remind us that agency is something individuals do, rather than merely a property they possess. Lundie (2019) explores the ways individual and institutional histories bear on agency, while Faure Walker (2019) and Halafoff, Lam, and Bouma (2019) both draw our attention to civic and theological literacy as drivers of agency, both in the classroom and beyond.

Besides the political and security state, and the teacher in the educational space, a further ‘agent’ encroaches on many of the articles in this issue: the role and influence of the media. Countering hostile media messages is key to the changes outlined by Halafoff, Lam, and Bouma (2019), while the construction of moral ‘threat’ is a focus of Stonebanks’ analysis (2019). The role of the media is understandable, given the tiny number of active extremist incidents that will ever likely develop, most professionals only experience these vicariously. My own article (Lundie 2019) focuses on the role of one such incident to show how fear of media attention can lead to reactive models of practice, more concerned with managing public perceptions than providing effective civic education.

Looking ahead, the focus of securitisation may be shifting; in the UK, government are now seeking to use similar powers to the Prevent duty, which as required schools to engage with counter-radicalisation, to hold schools accountable for knife-crime prevention (Coughlan 2019); while in the US, intelligence services have weighed into the investigation of university admissions fraud (Balingit et al. 2019). While the focus shifts from one moral panic to another, the application of technologies of inspection derived from security policing to matters of citizenship, civic, religious and moral education continues unabated, posing a challenge to educators and educational researchers to engage critically and proactively with the politics and ethics of the security state.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.