Governing an unknowable future: the politics of Britain’s Prevent policy^†

Abstract

This article argues that Prevent, Britain’s counter-radicalisation policy, has been an important and under-analysed site for contemporary renegotiations of threat; first, in that it seeks to act on threats existing within a radically unknowable future, and second, in terms of how it identifies those subjects seen to represent this future threat. In its ambition to tame this radical contingency, Prevent represents an extension of governmentality that acts at the level of potential, before the threat being targeted has come to exist. It does so by mediating these unknowable futures through ascriptions of identification, values and the danger it sees posed by disassociations from “Britishness” and then intervenes in the present, both pre-emptively through community cohesion and at a precautionary level through the Channel programme. What is at stake is the (re)generation and the policing of the boundaries of secured life, and ultimately, it will be argued, the possibilities of contemporary politics.

Keywords:

• Prevent
• counter-radicalisation
• premediation
• Channel
• community cohesion
• governmentality

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Stefan Elbe, Shane Brighton, Sahil Dutta, the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of the special issue for their many helpful thoughts and comments on this article.

Notes

1. This is not to say that the logics outlined in this article could not be ascribed to similar programmes in other countries, but the focus here is solely on the United Kingdom.

2. Aradau and van Munster (2008, 24–25) define dispositif as “a heterogeneous assemblage of discursive and material elements for governing social problems”, which here relates to the creation of “a specific relation to the future, which requires the monitoring of the future, the attempt to calculate what the future can offer and the necessity to control and minimize its potentially harmful effects”. It is a demand that we act under conditions of uncertainty.

3. Which, broadly defined, refer to the visualisations, models and knowledges that render governing the future possible in the present (de Goede and Simon 2013).

4. This analysis thus bear similarities to both Rose’s (1998) approach to the management of mental health, in which healthcare professionals are situated as overseeing both aggregate risk and particular risky individuals, and also to Anderson’s (2011, 222) theorising of US counterinsurgency doctrine as a “violent environmentality” in which “the population as a collective is presumed to be tensed between their present status and their future status as friend or enemy”.

5. This draws heavily upon a typology developed by Anderson (2010). The other technology identified is that of preparation, which, while clearly of importance in relation to contemporary obsessions with resilience, will not be discussed in this article.

6. While these subjectivities cannot be reduced to particular Muslim identities, the majority of Prevent work is focused upon them. However, the Prevent strategy (and the associated theorisation of radicalisation) has always maintained an applicability to any form of terrorism or extremism. Indeed, read as a means of acting upon the unknowable future, we should not doubt that this language and logic could be extended to non-Muslim danger.

7. This is also representative of the redistribution of Prevent powers that took effect in 2007. Essentially, by this point, the DCLG would coordinate communal interventions relating to cohesion and shared values, and the HO would focus on precautionary measures specific to individuals.

8. This reading of the Prevent policy is therefore at odds with much of the critical literature that constructs Prevent’s community cohesion and counter-radicalisation strands as conflicting (Martin forthcoming).

9. It should again be noted that recent iterations of Prevent have institutionally separated it from broader community cohesion initiatives. However, it is hopefully clear from the above analysis that the logics of Prevent demand cohesion as a response.

10. This is contrasted with the disciplinary process of “normation”. Such a process would establish the optimum model, the ideal subject towards whom all others would be compared and to which all movements and actions would be expected to conform (Foucault 2007, 56–57).

11. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

12. Thus, only 22% of referrals go on to receive support through the Channel process, and those deemed not vulnerable to being drawn into violent extremism may well be signposted to other services more appropriate to their needs (ACPO 2013). Moreover, many of those under 18 will not be deemed appropriate for Channel interventions (ACPO 2013), although it is clear from the guidance provided to schools that in high risk cases it is a possible path of action (ACPO 2009). Finally, not all referrals are from an Islamic background. Between April 2012 and March 2013, 57% were recorded as of Muslim faith (although in 27% of cases, religion was not known) (ACPO 2013). In this specific instance though, only figures for a limited period of Channel’s operation are given, and further, they do not distinguish between those referred and those accepted on to the Channel programme.

13. This dispersed set of responsibilities raises questions similar to that of Butler’s (2004) work regarding petty sovereigns, wherein diffuse bureaucrats have the power to direct, decide and intervene into those deemed to represent a threat. This raises issues of expertise, legitimacy and responsibility.

14. While my concerns here are primarily epistemic, there is an interesting and ambivalent question of freedom within these processes and operations of power. While recipients of Channel support must be aware that they are receiving support as part of a programme to protect people from radicalisation, it remains unstated the extent to which this support can be refused (HO 2012). The uneasy relationship which Channel would seem to have with the freedom of its subjects again places such interventions at the limits of governmentality. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting these tensions.

15. Although the spatial location of the potential resistance is crucial. While the pre-radicalised may not be killed, the suspected-insurgent of Anderson’s (2011, 222) analysis of Afghanistan clearly can.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Martin

Thomas Martin is an Associate Tutor and PhD Candidate in International Relations at the University of Sussex. His research interests include British counter-terrorism policy, post-structuralist theory, temporality and the spaces and practices of politics. He has a forthcoming chapter in Counter-Radicalisation: Critical Perspectives (Routledge).