Preventing radicalisation through dialogue? Self-securitising narratives versus reflexive conflict dynamics

Abstract

Critical scholarship has warned against basing the prevention of terrorism on a concept of ‘radicalisation’ which implies that violence is inherent to Islam, but various approaches disagree on how to base the critique. This article argues for reading counter-radicalisation policies as narratives in order to identify their potential in terms of conflict escalation. Analysis of the official Danish counter-radicalisation action plan, reactions to it, and reactions to the reactions finds that criticism from the targets of the policy and engaged scholars based on attention to conflict dynamics has had some success in modifying policy from securitising to governing risk. Nevertheless, the potential for re-securitisation remains.

Keywords:

• securitisation
• narrative
• radicalisation
• dialogue
• the Muslim Other

Acknowledgements

I owe thanks to Lasse Lindekilde for pushing me to develop this article to realise potentials which were only hypothesised in earlier versions of the argument.

Notes

1. In such a broader perspective, the securitization of migrants in general (Ceyhan and Tsoukala 2002) and Muslims in particular (Aydin and Acikmese 2008, Kaya 2009) is undoubtedly widespread in the Western world.

2. Available are both a civil servant draft (Ministeriet 2008), which lends itself particularly well to narrative analysis as it explains and argues for a range of instruments, and a final version authorised by the government, which more or less is reduced to a list of initiatives (Government of Denmark 2009).

3. Literally, ‘oplysning’ means ‘enlightenment’, but can also be translated ‘information’.

4. Literally, the Danish metaphor is even more definitive: ‘ … I decide where the closet is to stand’.

5. When in opposition a central element – formulated more or less openly – in the strategy to win office was that the Social Democrats should never lag behind the centre-right government in terms of tightening immigration and integration laws, cf. the so-called Sass Doctrine named after a prominent social democrat (Krause-Kjær 2010).

6. Assessing what is cause and effect is obviously difficult, but a survey of newspaper articles (both editorial material and letters to the editor) find that a number of buzzwords from the ‘debate on Muslims’ were used significantly less in 2011 than in any year since 2001 (Broberg and Kristensen 2012).

7. The chronology of the narrative which this article constructs is somewhat strained since the integration of radicalization prevention work in the general crime prevention scheme in some municipalities predated the formulation of the official Action Plan (cf. Kühle and Lindekilde 2009, p. 8). The Action Plan in part found inspiration from these local efforts.

8. Compare with this advice from Galtung: ‘do not polarize … [but] keep in contact with the opponent rather than avoid it; try to establish a dialogue with him rather than isolating from him or fighting him. Try to stem the tide towards black–white thinking, rather than indulging in the luxury of the traditional and destructive conflict stereotype. Try to let conflicting images of reality, one from the antagonist and one from oneself, coexist in one's mind – at least until further development leads to major revisions in the images’ (1978, p. 501).

9. Cf. the characterisation of worrying groups in Jakobsen and Jensen (2011, p. 8).

10. The Danish version has what literally translates to ‘an inner discussion with himself’.

11. Aradau and van Muster (2007) argue that terrorism prevention since 9/11 has formed a dispositif which has reconfigured risk management to include pre-emptive measures to avoid incalculable catastrophic risks. This might be so – and the task of telling the religiously orthodox from the potential terrorist definitively presents itself to the individual crime prevention worker as beyond the horizon of possible knowledge – but the way the Handbook Series presents the danger which is to be avoided has no catastrophic ring to it.

12. Ministeriet (2008, p. 18) refers to a Dutch precedent (NCTb 2007, pp. 41–42), which relies for central parts on Wiktorowitz (2005, pp. 20–24, cf. Kühle and Lindekilde 2009, pp. 20–22). Likewise, the Handbook Series draws on scholarship on social work and social psychology for some of the specific tools and the underlying conceptualizations (2012c, pp. 10, 18).

13. The Danish Police Intelligence supports a similar distinction in public communication (PET 2008).