Islamophobia, community cohesion and counter-terrorism policies in Britain

ABSTRACT

Alam and Husband explore the ways in which two policies of central government, in both conception and expression, have operated in such a way as to promote the growth of Islamophobia in Britain. Policies of community cohesion developed in response to the riots in northern British cities in 2001, while the counter-terrorist polices that emerged following the bombings on mainland Britain in 2005 were targeted at Britain's Muslim populations. The rhetoric employed in the public sphere to legitimate these policies had the effect of making Islamic identity salient, and aberrant, in the context of twenty-first-century Britain. The scapegoating of Muslims, as essentially an alien wedge in British society with a deep resistance to entering into ‘the British way of life’, was attached to an interpretation of their demographic location in British cities so as to present them as both ‘self-segregating’ and ‘living parallel lives’. The emergence of ‘home-grown bombers’ resulted in the state maintaining a sense of risk to terrorist assault that fed off and into the existing securitization of urban life, consolidating a policy environment defined by the sense of an essentially permanent state of crisis. These exceptional circumstances permitted a suspension of previously sacrosanct principles of human rights and freedoms. The empirical evidence underpinning this paper reinforces the notion that these policies were mutually contradictory in practice, and that the penetration of social cohesion initiatives by the logics of surveillance resulted in a breakdown of trust between large sections of the British Muslim population and the agents of the state.

Keywords:

• anti-Muslimism
• community cohesion
• counter-terrorism
• ethnic relations
• integration
• intergroup relations
• Islamophobia
• multiculturalism
• prevent
• social capital

Notes

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¹⁰John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick and Laurie A. Rudman (eds), On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years after Allport (Oxford: Blackwell 2005); Walter G. Stephan, Oscar Ybarra and Guy Bachman, ‘Prejudice towards immigrants’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol. 29, no. 11, 1999, 2221–37; Walter G. Stephan and Cookie White Stephan, Intergroup Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1996).

¹¹John T. Jost and David L. Hamilton, ‘Stereotypes in our culture’, in Dovidio, Glick and Rudman (eds), On the Nature of Prejudice, 208–24.

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¹³See, for example, Dominic Abrams and Michael A. Hogg (eds), Social Identity and Social Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell 1999).

¹⁴Kjartan Páll Sveinsson (ed.), Who Cares about the White Working Class? (London: Runnymede Trust 2009); Jenny Pearce and Elisabeth-Jane Milne, Participation and Community on Bradford's Traditionally White Estates: A Community Research Project (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2010).

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¹⁶Patricia Noxolo and Jef Huysmans (eds), Community, Citizenship and the ‘War On Terror’: Security and Insecurity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2009).

¹⁷Ted Cantle, Community Cohesion: A New Framework for Race and Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2008); John Flint and David Robinson (eds), Community Cohesion in Crisis? New Dimensions of Diversity and Difference (Bristol: Policy Press 2008).

¹⁸John Field, Social Capital (London: Routledge 2003).

¹⁹Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York and London: Simon and Schuster 2000).

²⁰Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press 2000).

²¹Pauline Hope Cheong, Rosalind Edwards, Harry Goulbourne and John Solomos, ‘Immigration, social cohesion and social capital: a critical review’, Critical Social Policy, vol. 27, no. 1, 2007, 24–49; Rosalind Edwards, Jane Franklin and Janet Holland (eds), Social Capital: Concepts, Policy and Practice (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars 2006); Field, Social Capital.

²²Derek McGhee, ‘Moving to “our” common ground’, 385.

²³See, for example, Bradford Race Review (chaired by Herman Ouseley), Community Pride Not Prejudice: Making Diversity Work in Bradford (Bradford: Bradford Vision 2001); Community Cohesion Independent Review Team, Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team, Chaired by Ted Cantle (London: Home Office 2001).

²⁵Mike Savage, Yaojun Li and Gindo Tampubolon, ‘Rethinking the politics of social capital: challenging Tocquevillian perspectives’, in Edwards, Franklin and Holland (eds), Social Capital, 70–94 (73–4).

²⁴On the scapegoating of the African Caribbean communities in Britain, see Stuart Hall, Charles Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London: Macmillan 1978); Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson 1987).

²⁶Noxolo and Huysmans (eds), Community, Citizenship and the ‘War on Terror’.

²⁷Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre (London: Macmillan 1991), 393.

²⁸Peter Hennessy, ‘From secret state to protective state’, in Peter Hennessy (ed.), The New Protective State: Government, Intelligence and Terrorism (London: Continuum 2007), 1–41 (6).

²⁹Richard Ashby Wilson (ed.), Human Rights in the ‘War On Terror’ (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2005).

³⁰HM Government, Countering International Terrorism: The United Kingdom's Strategy, Cm 6888 (London: The Stationery Office 2006), 8.

³¹Jörg Monar, ‘Common threat and common response? The European Union's counter-terrorism strategy and problems’, Government and Opposition, vol. 42, no. 3, 2007, 292–313 (301).

³²See, for example, Brigitte L. Nacos, Mass-Mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism and Counterterrorism, 2nd edn (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield 2007); and Brooke Barnett and Amy Reynolds, Terrorism and the Press: An Uneasy Relationship (New York: Peter Lang 2009).

³³House of Lords/House of Commons Joint Committee on Human Rights, Counter-Terrorism Policy and Human Rights (Seventeenth Report): Bringing Human Rights Back In, HL Paper 86, HC 111 (London: The Stationery Office 2010), 3.

³⁴Cited in Richard Mottram, ‘Protecting the citizen in the twenty-first century: issues and challenges’, in Hennessy (ed.), The New Protective State, 42–65 (50).

³⁵Charles Husband and Yunis Alam, Social Cohesion and Counter-Terrorism: A Policy Contradiction? (Bristol: Policy Press 2011).

³⁶Charles Husband and Yunis Alam, Social Cohesion and Counter-Terrorism: A Policy Contradiction? (Bristol: Policy Press 2011). 147.

³⁷Charles Husband and Yunis Alam, Social Cohesion and Counter-Terrorism: A Policy Contradiction? (Bristol: Policy Press 2011). 146.

³⁸Charles Husband and Yunis Alam, Social Cohesion and Counter-Terrorism: A Policy Contradiction? (Bristol: Policy Press 2011). 146.

⁴⁰Charles Husband and Yunis Alam, Social Cohesion and Counter-Terrorism: A Policy Contradiction? (Bristol: Policy Press 2011), 150.

³⁹Charles Husband and Yunis Alam, Social Cohesion and Counter-Terrorism: A Policy Contradiction? (Bristol: Policy Press 2011), 151.

⁴¹Charles Husband and Yunis Alam, Social Cohesion and Counter-Terrorism: A Policy Contradiction? (Bristol: Policy Press 2011), 151.

⁴²Runnymede Trust, Islamophobia, 5.

⁴³Sandra Wallman, ‘The boundaries of “race”: processes of ethnicity in England’, Man, vol. 13, no. 2, 1978, 200–17.

⁴⁵Martin Barker, The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe (London: Junction Books 1981), 23.

⁴⁴Martin Barker, The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe (London: Junction Books 1981).

⁴⁶Liz Fekete, A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe (London: Pluto Press 2009).