Suspect community or suspect category? The impact of counter-terrorism as ‘policed multiculturalism’

ABSTRACT

How to think about the impact of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation on ethnic and religious accommodation? Much of the literature draws on the concept of ‘suspect community’, suggesting it has primarily alienated the Muslim community, favouring an assimilationist model of ‘muscular liberalism’. In this article, while I consider the merits of the ‘suspect community’ hypothesis, I argue that it only partially accounts for the effects of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation on multicultural societies. I contend that much of the literature has focused too narrowly on the discriminatory effects of counter-terrorist policies and has been unable to grasp the more insidious political effects of counter-terrorism policies based on the active participation and involvement of Muslims in their own policing. The main hypothesis of this paper is that rather than promoting ‘assimilation’, as the government would expect, or alienation, as the advocates of the ‘suspect community’ hypothesis would contend, counter-terrorist policies produce and reinforce a government of society in discrete and divided ethno-religious groups. Such ‘policed multiculturalism’—understood as the recognition and the management of diversity through a security perspective—has an important consequence in that it removes fundamental questions about pluralism from political debate, casting them instead in a depoliticised language of security.

KEYWORDS:

• Suspect community
• multiculturalism
• assimilation
• counter-terrorism
• counter-radicalisation

Introduction

Multiculturalism, as an institutional programme of management of ethnic and religious diversity, has fallen out of favour among politicians across Europe in recent years, at least in official discourse (Bleich 2003; Joppke 2004). One of the main reasons behind this new stance lies in the alleged connection between multiculturalism and ‘homegrown terrorism’—namely a terrorist threat coming from within European societies (Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010). Cameron's now famous speech delivered at the Munich Security conference on the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism and the need to promote ‘muscular liberalism’ (Cameron 2011) echoed an earlier speech by Germany's Chancelor Angela Merkel along similar lines, which was presented in the midst of a national debate on the issue in 2010. This shift in the discourse is consistently justified in simple terms: security and counter-terrorism. The threat of ‘home-grown terrorism’ and ‘Islamic extremism’ is directly attributed to the fact that ‘we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream’ (Cameron 2011).

In this context, optimists on the government's side would expect counter-terrorist policies to be at the forefront of the enactment of ‘muscular liberalism’. In the UK, for example, the application of community-policing principles is allegedly an effort to ‘bridge steep trade-offs between effective prevention and the social and political integration of Britain's Muslims’ (Klausen 2009, 403). The majority of current scholarship shows however an opposite trend. Research on the impact of counter-terrorism on Muslim communities is dominated by the idea that these policies produce a ‘suspect community’. Originally developed by Hillyard (1993) in the context of British anti-terror laws in Northern Ireland, the concept has been adopted by a large range of authors to discuss the current effects of anti-terror laws (Awan 2012; Hickman et al. 2012; Pantazis and Simon 2009).

In this article I argue that the suspect community thesis only partially accounts for the effects of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation on multicultural societies. Much of the literature has focused too narrowly on the discriminatory effects of counter-terrorist policies and has been unable to grasp the complex, multifaceted and more insidious political effects of counter-terrorism policies based on the active participation and involvement of Muslims in their own policing. Thus, rather than promoting ‘assimilation’ as the government would expect, or alienation as the proponents of the ‘suspect community’ hypothesis would contend, counter-terrorist policies reproduce and reinforce the differential government of society. Such ‘policed multiculturalism’—understood as the recognition and the management of diversity through a security perspective—has an important consequence in that it removes fundamental questions about pluralism from political debate, casting them instead in a depoliticised language of security.

Counter-terrorism and the suspect community

The literature on the impact of counter-terrorism policies on Muslim communities is relatively limited, as a few scholars have noted (Jarvis and Michael 2013; Mythen and Walklate 2009; Vertigans 2010). Studies that provide original empirical material consist predominantly of small-N, qualitative analyses based on focus groups (Awan 2012; Choudhury and Fenwick 2011; Jarvis and Michael 2013; Kundnani 2009; McGovern and Tobin 2010; Mythen and Walklate 2009), qualitative interviews (Blackwood, Hopkins, and Reicher 2012; Mcdonald 2011), and to a smaller extent ethnographic observation (Brittain 2009). Geographically, studies are overwhelmingly focused on the UK. Some studies draw on a cross-country comparison (Haverig 2013; Poynting and Perry 2007; Spalek and Alia 2007), others on a cross-case comparison between with the Irish experiences of counter-terrorism (Hickman et al. 2012; McGovern and Tobin 2010; Nickels et al. 2012; Peirce 2012), but most are single-case studies.

Scholarly work on the impact of counter-terrorism on Muslim communities formulates general claims about the performative character of these policies on Muslim identities. By ‘performative’, I mean that these studies imply that state practices have a direct influence on how Muslims both perceive themselves and are perceived by the rest of society. While not all studies are grounded in an explicit theoretical framework, some frame their analysis in terms of state racism (Brittain 2009; Fekete 2004) or politics of risk (Heath-Kelly 2012; Mythen 2012; Mythen and Walklate 2009). The vast majority, however, subscribes to the analysis that for Muslims in the UK counter-terrorism is not felt in isolation, but as being part of a broader ‘suspect community’ (Choudhury and Fenwick 2011). Pantazis and Pemberton have most explicitly applied the notion of ‘suspect community’ to the contemporary targeting of Muslim populations (Pantazis and Simon 2009). The concept draws on the work of Hillyard (1993) on the effects of the Prevention of Terrorism Acts (PTAs) 1974 in Britain.

For Hillyard, a certain number of aspects of the PTA led to the designation of the Irish as suspect community: the broad scope of offences created under the PTA, the focus and unbalanced targeting of a single community, the use of police powers to gather intelligence and information and the creation of a double penal system, marking a difference between ‘Ordinary Decent Criminals’ subjected to the rule of law, and the ‘Terrorists’ subjected to an exceptional treatment (Hillyard 1993). Pantazis and Pemberton argue that Muslims have replaced the Irish as the ‘suspect community’ in contemporary Britain. They define suspect community as ‘a sub-group of the population that is singled out for state attention as being ‘problematic’. Specifically in terms of policing, individuals may be targeted, not necessarily as a result of suspected wrong doing, but simply because of their presumed membership in the group. Race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, language, accent, dress, political ideology or any combination of these factors may serve to delineate the sub-group's characteristics (Pantazis and Simon 2009, 649). Importantly, for Pantazis and Pemberton, the notion of suspect community is not conceived of as a legal category, but a broader ‘sociological study of people's experiences of the law rather than enquiry on the application and misapplication of legal rules’ (Pantazis and Simon 2009, 648). Thus, they maintain that counter-terrorism affects social identities and produces a sense of community. Pantazis and Pemberton envisage suspicion in the form of a pyramid, in which at the top, a minority of formal suspects is targeted by control orders and surveillance, in the middle informal suspects are targeted by stop and search orders, and finally at the bottom the ‘whole Muslim community’ is targeted by media, political and civil society discourses (Pantazis and Simon 2011, 1057).

In support of the suspect community thesis, Pantazis and Permberton as well as several other authors have documented the effect of counter-terrorism measures, revealing the extent to which they have indeed predominantly targeted Muslim populations in Europe. These comprise both ‘hard’ measures that involve the use of coercive powers of the state and ‘softer’ measures, which focus on preventative community initiatives.

Hard counter-terrorism: judicial and administrative measures

Broadly speaking, counter-terrorism is found to generate feelings of insecurity, vulnerability and anger among the Muslim community is primarily targets. ‘Stop and search’ powers are one of the most criticised measures. In the UK, sections 44 (1–2) of the TA 2000 gave police ‘stop and search’ powers within entire geographical areas without the need for reasonable suspicion linked to a specific individual (HM Government 2000).¹ A similar set of measures was introduced in the Netherlands in 2001,² and reinforced in 2004,³ where the prosecutor can designate an entire area to be submitted to stop and search operations for a renewable 12 hours under terrorism law (Den Boer 2007, 290; van der Leun and van der Woude 2011, 449). In the UK, the use of these powers have increased dramatically after September 11th 2001: those searched grew from 6400 to 10,200 between the 2000/2001 and 2001/2002 period and reaching 50,000 in 2005/2006. A very small proportion (never greater than 1.4%) of all searches actually led to arrests. More importantly, however, Black and Asian people were three times more likely to be searched than Whites under these powers (Pantazis and Simon 2009, 655). Similar statistics reveal a discriminatory use of stop powers at UK's borders, under what is known as ‘schedule 7’ stops (Choudhury and Fenwick 2011, x).

In addition to these measures, another broad range of legal and administrative measures is considered to generate a sense of ‘suspect community’. In the UK, the period of pre-charge detention, for example, has been extended from 48 to up to 14 days with the TA 2006 (Horne and Gavin 2012), while it never exceeded 48 hours in the heydays of Provisional Irish Republican Army attacks. Similarly, other European countries have introduced lengthier pre-charge (six days instead of two in France) or pre-trial detention periods (two years instead of 90 days in the Netherlands) for terrorism prosecutions (Bigo et al. 2014, 19). Police raids and police custody, target Muslims more often, and are found to be a source of anxiety and feeling of vulnerability, even if the arrested are released without charge (Choudhury and Fenwick 2011, 77). The repeated court appearances and unannounced police visits related to control orders are equally found to have a strong psychological impact on children and families (Brittain 2009, 5). The freezing of assets, introduced after UN Security Council resolutions 1267 and 1373 have allowed to target individuals without trial, and most of them were Muslims (Sullivan 2014). It was replaced by control orders and now TPIMs, who concern predominantly Muslims. While there is no space to detail all the existing measures in detail, the broadening of the definition of terrorism in order to criminalise humanitarian aid, and the revocation of passports of citizens travelling to Syria or Afghanistan enacted by several European countries has similarly targeted mostly Muslims. The laws passed to increase the online monitoring of websites and online activities, the proscription of organisations, the growing culture of secrecy in terrorism trials, inasmuch as they have concerned predominantly Muslims, all these measures all support the thesis according to which Muslims form part of a ‘suspect community’.

Soft counter-terrorism: preventing violent extremism

A second set of counter-terrorism measures, aimed at countering radicalisation and ‘violent extremism’, while in appearance more benign, is also found to participate of the formation of the suspect community. In the Netherlands, these measures have been part of the ‘broad approach’ since 2002–2003. In the UK, they emerged with the Prevent Strategy in 2006–2007. These programmes consists in a wide range of activities: from youth camps to sport activities, debates and discussion workshops, theatre, music and film projects, and internet awareness programmes. Because Prevent was initially based on the assumption that the recourse to politically motivated violence was due to dire economic and social conditions, it was deployed in local authorities through the Department of Communities and Local Government—on the controversial basis of the percentage of Muslim population in designated target areas (Thomas 2012). This coincided, after the economic crisis of 2008, with important cuts in community-related spending. Community projects flagged as Prevent became therefore one of the only sources of funding for several NGOs, who then had to take the difficult decision whether to accept abundant ‘counter-terrorism’ funding for their activities or chase meagre alternative sources. The ‘Muslim community’ here, is therefore understood as a reified, monolithic and cohesive group which is collectively responsible for the violence emerging from its midst, and therefore perceived to be collectively responsible for addressing the issue. This led, for some, to ‘tweak’ regular community projects to match the descriptions of the funding stream (in particular refocus on Muslim beneficiaries), irrespective of the risk the beneficiaries posed in terms of radicalisation. For others, this focus amounted to pure and simple stigmatisation of the Muslim community, considered as a suspect community composed entirely of potential terrorists. For non-Muslim community leaders, it generated frustration, as the traditional funding sources they relied on became unavailable, and they could not claim the new ones (Thomas 2012). The CHANNEL mentoring programme raised similar concerns. Individuals are identified by or referred to professionals (police, local authorities, teachers, doctors, social workers, youth services, offender management services) who then devise a ‘support plan’ for the individual, generally through a mentoring programme. Between 2007 and 2010, 1120 people were referred to CHANNEL (House of Commons 2012, 29). Although CHANNEL is not purely targeted at young Muslims, there is a widespread feeling in the Muslim community that regular activities such as political involvement in peace movements or a pious religious practice, when carried out by young Muslims, trigger unnecessary referral to the CHANNEL programme, due to the lack of experience of those who refer them (Choudhury and Fenwick 2011, 64).

A second controversial issue has been raised by several community members, scholars and NGOs: the partnerships established between community representatives and local counter-terrorist police are in fact used as covert means of gathering intelligence about the structure and relations within the community (Kundnani 2009). While the CLG report (2010) states that the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism investigated the accusations of spying in 2009 and found them unfounded, the controversy around the covert CCTV-based counter-terrorist project Champion in Birmingham in 2010 provided concrete evidence of covert counter-terrorism intelligence gathering by the police (Thorntonn 2010). The focus of the most recent Prevent strategy (HM Government 2011), as well as the results of the Prime Minister's Task Force on Tackling Radicalisation and Extremism (HM Government 2013) further reinforce the fear of ‘snooping’, with the focus on institutions such as schools, universities or hospitals, where teachers, professors or doctors are encouraged to report potential ‘radicals’.

The third problematic aspect of the Prevent strategy as it is currently formulated (HM Government 2011) and reinforced by the Task force report (HM Government 2013) consists in the ever narrower conception of the ‘acceptable’ Muslim representatives. This point has been forcefully made by former Metropolitan Police Muslim Contact Unit (MCU) director Lambert (2011) about the first Prevent strategy and has been confirmed since. Indeed, strongly influenced by the positions of think tanks such as the Quilliam Foundation and the Policy Exchange, the coalition government in the UK considered many of the previous partners of the Prevent programmes, such as the Muslim Council of Britain or the Muslim Association of Britain or the Islamic Society of Britain, as ‘Islamists’ and has therefore stopped to involve them in Prevent-related work. The current approach, focusing on partnering only with ideologically moderate representatives present therefore the danger of being counter-productive, in (1) portraying the partnership programmes as purely mouthpieces for the government and (2) shifting the legitimacy towards organisations that oppose a government perceived as biased.

Three approaches to the suspect community

Although the practices of counter-terrorism across Europe seem to provide a solid grounding to the ‘suspect community’ thesis, I argue that it misses two of the most crucial aspects of the impact of contemporary counter-terrorist and counter-radicalisation policies: first, the differentiated experience of counter-terrorism linked to the inherent heterogeneity of the ‘community’ and second the pro-active involvement of Muslims in their own policing. As such, while the ‘suspect community’ has its merits in highlighting the discriminatory aspects of counter-terrorism, it is unable to account for the involvement and support that counter-terrorism has garnered among a certain fringe of the Muslim population, as well as the active collaboration of a group of ethnic and religious leaders who have both been active in and benefitted from these policies. The reasons for these failures, I argue, are to be found in a certain number of theoretical assumptions, which, althrough they are not explicit in the texts of Hillyard nor Pantanzis and Pemberton, implicitely inform meanings of suspicion, community and politics.

Community as categorisation and identification

A first aspect of the ‘suspect community’ thesis, as currently formulated by Pantazis and Pemberton is that it seems pulls the notion of ‘community’ in two contradictory directions: a Weberian conception of community as the product of a process of identification and categorisation and a Tönnesian conception of community as particular social formation. At first sight, the two authors seem to draw on a constructivist understanding of the notion of community, which we can locate in the Weberian notion of ‘community formation’, or ‘Gemeinschaftsbildung’. This is what Pantanzis and Pemberton have in mind when drawing on Hillyard, they define the ‘suspect community’ as ‘a sub-group of the population that is singled out for state attention’ as being problematic’. They argue that the ‘sub-group’ is ‘delineated’ by a possible combination of criteria. The 2000 terrorism act ‘facilitated the designation’ of Muslims as a suspect community. Counter-terrorism powers ‘identify the threat’ as originating from the Muslim community. In the Weberian tradition, indeed, the ‘community’ does not exist as such; it is the product of political processes of identification and categorisation. The problem however is that for Weber, the commonality of situation or feeling does not establish a social relation. ‘It is only when this feeling leads to a mutual orientation of their behaviour to each other’ that a relationship may be termed ‘communal’ (Weber 1978, 27). From a Weberian perspective, Pantazis and Pemberton therefore conflate on the one hand, what the German sociologist would consider the condition of possibility for the marginalised to mobilise and engage in collective action (being targeted by outsiders), and on the other the process of community formation itself, which for Weber can only be the result of active social and political interaction. The community derived from the experience of suspicion would therefore need to be traced in institutionalised reactions of NGOs, political parties or grassroots organisations to counter-terrorism and their capacity to foster alternative feelings of belonging. Furthermore, the Weberian approach emphasises the politics and forms of domination taking place both between and within communities. It would also highlight the struggles between the dominant, the representatives, the spokespersons and the dominated members of the community. In this sense the ‘suspect community’ thesis would explore the relations of power between the ‘suspects’ rather than treating them as a unified category. Community is ultimately the outcome of a political agency rather than its source; as such the ‘suspect community’ would not be one, but multiple and competing ‘suspect communities’, vying for political recognition.

Yet, Pantazis and Pemberton do not chose this route. Rather, they argue, the ‘suspect community’, in singular, is defined by a ‘common subjective experience’, based on ‘ummatic attachments of some individuals that promote solidarity with fellow oppressed Muslims’. Their rebuttal to one of their critics, Steven Greer, illustrates this point: ‘the unearthing of a common subjective experience among Muslims becomes problematic for Greer, because he rejects the very idea that there is a Muslim community in Britain. In making his case, he denies [ … ] the common Muslim experience—‘that is a negative experience of discrimination’ (Greer 2010, 1057). To be sure, the two authors conceive of outside categorisation as heterogenous, ‘fluid and non-static’, experienced differentially by different members of the community. Yet in their account, community is not about processes of identification, political mobilisation and struggle. It is about a common experience and feeling of solidarity. What Pantazis and Pemberton seem to mobilise is therefore an idea of community that matches the traditional Tönniesian or Durkheimian perspective of ‘Gemeinschaft’, namely a type of solidarity, characterised by common ways of life and beliefs, concentrated social ties marked by face-to-face encounters, frequent interaction, ruled by tradition, familiarity and emotional bonds (Durkheim 1997; Tönnies 2001). Suspicion, it this perspective, would function as a form of exclusion from mainstream society (‘Gesellschaft’) and the relegation to the more familiar, and primordial modalities of socialisation, the ‘community’. In this understanding, however, community is conceived as pre-existing the experience of counter-terrorism, and the function of suspicion is that of removing individuals from one form of existing socialisation—society—to confine them to another, if more restricted ‘community’. Of course, this notion of community could be subjected to the traditional critiques of romanticism and reification, but it would be consistent with a long tradition of community studies. Yet in the current account of the ‘suspect community’, Pantazis and Pemberton's do not provide us enough clues for the formation of these specific modes of solidarity. There is no discussion of how the experience of counter-terrorism influences face-to-face relations, interactions, and modes of self-regulation. From this perspective, and contrarily to Greer's critique, the problem is that they do not provide any clues as to how suspicion ‘generates’ a community beyond a mere category. In sum, while Pantazis and Pemberton convincingly show that there is such as thing as a ‘suspect category’, they are at odds to show how this category forms a ‘suspect community’.

Community as government

The second main effects of the ‘suspect community’ thesis, is to miss the differentialist effects of ‘soft policing’ and counter-radicalisation on Muslim communities, and in particular the valorisation of the involvement of Muslims in the policing of their own community. In building their case, Pantazis and Pemberton argue indeed that the Prevent strategy is the first layer of their pyramid, deemed to ‘construct the whole Muslim as ‘suspect’ (2011, 1056). They recognise that in Prevent ‘the whole Muslim community becomes responsibilised into taking action against fellow members; failure to do so implies blame, acceptance and potentially even support for terrorist activity’, yet they equate processes of responsibilisation to process of ‘demonisation’. As they argue, through Ratna Lachman's quotation: ‘the entire premise of the PREVENT agenda is one where it demonises an entire community, in terms of turning them into a suspect community. They are blamed for the 7/7 bombings, and critically I think what is happening is responsibility for tackling Muslim extremism rests with the Muslim community.’ In conflating responsibilisation, community-oriented solutions with their hypothesis of discrimination and ‘demonisation’ Pantazis and Pemberton consider the ‘suspect community’ as a side effect, a negative externality of the fight on terrorism, and fail to recognizing the central, insidiously productive role that community acquires in the very operation of counter-terrorism.

Authors drawing on the work of Foucault, such as Rose (1999), have however shown how in contemporary neoliberal societies, power does not only operate through repressive modes of government, but also through freedom and empowerment. From a foucauldian perspective, community is not considered as a social formation or a process of mobilisation, but rather as a specific entry-point for practices of power. This contemporary programme of government, which Rose defines as the ‘government through community’ is organised in terms of the relations of identification between the person and ‘their community’, intended as ‘the particular real or purported collectivity to which each individual is assumed to belong, bound by kinship, religion, residence, shared plight or moral affinity’ (Rose 1996). This mode of government functions through a process of differentiation—which Foucault defines a process of ‘normalisation’—between those considered ‘governable’, who are to be encouraged, nurtured, celebrated, ‘in the hope of producing consequences that are desirable for all’, which Rose terms of the ‘affiliated’, and others, the ‘marginalised’, composed of those who are unable or unwilling to be governed. This process is embedded in an everyday, routine of categorisation that is diffused through the social and political body. The distinction between the ‘affiliated’ and the ‘marginalised’ then organises a differentiated treatment and programme of government. On the one hand it aims at ‘empowering’ and ‘responsibilising’ the affiliated, in particular the spokespersons who can claim to speak in the name of the community, by ‘linking them in new ways into the political apparatus in order to enact programmes which seek to regenerate the economic and human fabric of an area by re-activating in ‘the community’ these ‘natural’ virtues which it has temporarily lost’ (Rose 1996, 336). On the other hand, it subjects the ‘ungovernable’, the ‘marginalised’ to an alternative: either be ‘reformed’ or be definitively ‘excluded’. This approach, which further complicates the notion of community, locates suspicion and marginalisation as only one of the possible mechanisms of the government through community. A more potent one is the one of ‘affiliation’ and ‘empowerment’, which the current rendering of the suspect community overlooks (Cruikshank 1999). It is also the conditions for politics of contestation to emerge: ‘imagined communities, created by the activity of local activists or emerging as the reciprocal, as it were, of such governmental projects, can form the locus of the articulation of demands upon political authorities and resistance to such authorities: the language of community and the identity which is its referent becomes the site of new contestations’ (Rose). Drawing on this third formulation of the notion of community, in the next section I propose an alternative conceptualisation of this impact and a few directions for future research.

Governing suspicion through community

As an alternative to the suspect community thesis, I suggest to approach counter-terrorist and counter-radicalisation policies as a specific form of ‘government through community’ based on a differentialist approach to suspicion and recognition, characterised by the blurring of two sectors of governmental activity: that of policing and that of the traditional functions of the multicultural welfare state. I term this ‘policed multiculturalism’. Looking at counter-radialisation as ‘policed multiculturalism’ opens three broader fields of investigation (1) the formation of the distinct categories of trust and suspicion; (2) the enactment of differentiated techniques of power; (3) the impact of these forms of power on forms of solidarity and identification.

Distinct and ambivalent categories of trust and suspicion

The first hypothesis of policed multiculturalism, contrarily to the ‘suspect community’ thesis, is that it functions through multiple categories of suspicion. Indeed, the ‘suspect’ community can only be understood in relation to at least another category: that of the ‘trusted’ Muslims. An important section of the Muslim population supports or actively collaborates with state institutions in carrying out both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ counter-terrorism. The function of this category is in part captured by Mamdani's notion of the ‘good Muslims’ namely ‘modern, secular, Westernised’ who share the values and norms of liberal society (Mamdani 2003, 21). Yet, while in Mamdani's conception the ‘good Muslim’ is a passive one, I suggest this category perform an additional, active, function: they are also ‘trusted’ Muslims: it is among them that the state institutions will find those to employ in its ranks, as police officers, community organisers, ‘Prevent coordinators’ or local authority equalities officers.

On the one hand, the trusted Muslims are necessary for the state to ensure its legitimacy. Precisely because they are Muslim and belong to the alleged ‘community’, the aim is to ‘tap’ into their real or purported network of relations, their social capital, and their fine-grained knowledge of cultural specificities. These are perceived to be required to best communicate, understand, but also convince, the ‘community’ they come from. In Foucauldian terms, these are the Muslims whose ‘conduct’ can be ‘conducted’, their value is not only that of having accepted the legitimacy of the state, but also to form literally a necessary channel between the white middle class milieu of security and political circles, the ‘professionals of security’ and ‘professionals of politics’ (Bigo 2006) and the Muslim neighbourhoods of Birmingham, the Hague or Toulouse. In that sense, the ‘trusted Muslim’ occupy a similar function to that of the local leaders trusted by colonial powers to properly carry out the demands of indirect rule (Duffield 2005).

On the other hand, the ‘bad Muslims’, the ‘suspect’, the ‘radicals’, the ‘extremists’ are those considered unable or unwilling of serving as a such ‘conduit’. As such, the category is not dependent on the ideological or religious orientation of these individuals and groups, but upon their failed alignment with the bureaucratic or political requirements of the moment. As the fall from grace of organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain or the Muslim Association of Britain after the election of the Coalition government in the UK has shown, the border between the ‘trusted’ and the ‘suspect’ is extremely narrow. Within the category of the suspect, however, a further distinction is operated, between those who can still be re-incorporated in the political body, and those form who there is nothing left to do. It is in this light that the ambivalent category of ‘risk’, as analysed by Aradau (2004) and mobilised by Heath-Kelly (2012) should be understood: on the one hand, the ‘unable’ are victimised as being ‘at risk’ of becoming radical, portrayed as the powerless subjects of radical preaches, online propaganda and Youtube videos. This category that can still be reformed. On the other hand, the category of the ‘risky’ refers to the ones for whom it is too late, they represent a threat of contagion which must be stopped in order to avoid the spread of the ‘disease’.

While a certain number of authors drawing on a Foucauldian framework have highlighted the inner workings of these distinctions in official documents and political discourse, less work has been dedicated to the analysis of the social practices through which these categorisations have been formulated, enacted, diffused and adopted. The criteria according to which different populations are distributed in these three categories are indeed not merely discursive, but the outcome of concrete struggles within and between professionals of at least three social ‘fields’: professionals of security (intelligence services, police) professionals of politics and professionals of social work (social workers, educators). The struggles take place between the fields, but also within the fields, for the monopoly over the determination of the categories of suspicion. Robert Lambert's account of the stark differences between the Association of Chief Police Officers who targeted non-violent radical groups such as the British Muslim Initiative (BMI), considering them linked to terrorist groups, and the Special Branch's MCU who actively collaborated with BMI to take the Finsbury Park mosque, is a good illustration of this point (Lambert 2011). The spreading of the imperative of suspicion to other fields (social work, education, medicine) has equally generated competitions for expertise, generating a proper cottage industry of experts and manuals, aimed at training non-professionals in the pro-active distinction between ‘trusted’, ‘victims’ and ‘suspects’, which has only started to be analysed through a sociological lens, in particular at the local level (Husband and Alam 2011; Thomas 2014). Although authors such as Husband and Alam (2011) have explored in depth the contradictions between the security requirements of the central government and the objectives of community cohesion at the local level, much remains to be researched about the structuration of these categories in practice, their embodiment in institutional habituses of security professionals, and the circulation of ‘models’ between internal counter-terrorism and external doctrines and practices of counter-insurgency (Miller and Rizwaan 2013).

This first hypothesis therefore departs therefore from the ‘suspect community’ in two significant ways. First, while Pantazis and Pemberton's suspect community thesis see both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ counter-terrorism as contributing to the formation of a single category of ‘suspect’, I argue that at least three distinct categories are outlined: the ‘trusted’, the ‘victim’ and the ‘risky’. Second, contrarily to the suspect community thesis, which assumes clear boundaries of both ‘suspicion’ and ‘community’, the characteristic of policed multiculturalism is ambivalence in this categorisation: the establishment of the frontier between the trusted and the suspect is an extremely fine line that is constantly negotiated. The ‘trusted’ Muslims of yesterday can become the ‘suspects’ of tomorrow and vice versa. Categories of suspicion are therefore multiple and shifting.

Differentiated techniques of government

A second proposition is that the processes of categorisation described function only because they are enacted in specific social agents’ practices. These practices are the key to understand Pantazis and Pemberton's missing account of the passage from ‘category’ to ‘community’. In other words, an analysis of the impact of counter-terrorism cannot limit itself to the analysis of legal or policing categories in official discourse assume that community ‘happens’. It needs to account for the everyday routines and practices of their enactment, as well as the differentiated effects that these techniques produce on the populations they target.

For ‘trusted’ Muslims, the main techniques of government are those of ‘empowerment’, ‘partnership’ and ‘community policing’, which take their roots in the pro-active and self-management imperatives of neoliberal governmentality in multicultural settings (Cruikshank 1999). ‘Trusted Muslims’ are encouraged to put their capital of ‘authenticity’ to good use in order to attain the ‘hard-to-reach’ individuals. Policed multiculturalism offers them the possibility to convert their linguistic, cultural and social capital into economic and symbolic capital, under the form of funding and employment which might increase their social status and ranking in society. ‘Trusted Muslims’ are not only ‘good Muslims’, they are the necessary articulations of a policy of community representation and infiltration in the Muslim population, which is why the institutions of policed multiculturalism invest in traineeships to increase their skills, such as leadership programmes, insert them in national and international networks such as the Radicalisation Awareness Network to increase their social capital and experience. Of course, the ‘trusted Muslims’ are not given carte blanche. They are ‘conducted’ through pervasive yet subtle principles of good management. ‘Community leaders’ are indeed appointed as representatives of their ‘community’ and governed through a logic of entrepreneurship: their cooperation is enacted through calls for tenders and projects, such as those of Prevent, which constantly need to be reviewed and approved, both for their ‘impact’ along national policy indicators, but also for their economic soundness. Through processes of funding, political choices to promote or marginalise a community figure can be carried out under the cover of de-politicised criteria of ‘mismanagement’ or inability to meet ‘good governance’ requirements, such UK's government of Mosques through the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (Ali 2013). The literature has yet to provide a convincing account of the grooming of a Muslim elite into the circles of professionals of security and professionals of politics, as well as the specific practices of ‘empowerment’ they are subjected to.

Indeed, the literature is much more prolific on the practices enacted on those who are not trusted. If ‘trusted Muslims’ fail to align with the interests of professionals of security or professionals of politics, they can rapidly fall in the ‘victim’ or ‘risky’ categories: the ‘politics of recognition’ can quickly become a ‘politics of reconnaissance’ in the military sense of the term. Police-community partnerships can also serve a means for the authorities to map and surveil its members, as Kundnani (2009) has shown, and the Champion affair has confirmed (Thorntonn 2010). The ambivalent nature of community policing as both a source of partnership and intelligence is at the core of its development (Bonnet 2011). Much has been said about the importance of databases, biometrics and algorithms in techniques of profiling at the border (Amoore 2011). Yet much less has been said of more ‘low tech’ modes of categorisation, embedded in day-to-day knowledge of communities, filtered through institutional habituses of security professionals (Bonelli and Ragazzi 2014). Less has equally been said about the inner workings of ‘rehabilitation’ techniques used in mentorship programmes such as Channel, or the ‘Healthy Identity Interventions’ deployed in prisons, used to reform populations that are considered as ‘victims’; as well as the fine line that distinguishes ‘empowerment’ and ‘redressing’. As Rose puts it,

under the sign of empowerment, one thus can observe the redeployment of the whole panoply of psychological technologies for reforming conduct in relation to particular norms, from individual psychotherapy in various rational and cognitive forms, through the use of programmed behavioural techniques to group work. (1996, 348)

Finally for the individuals deemed ‘risky’ the enactment of the harshest forms of exclusion, drawing on old techniques of banning and punishment and grounded in administrative and judicial measures has been broadly documented. These can be techniques of immobilisation such as the freezing of assets, the indefinite detention regime, or the removal of passports. Or they can be subjected to techniques of exclusion, such as the deprivation of citizenship, deportation and in the most extreme and rare cases torture—as in the case of extraordinary rendition—or death—as in the case of drone killings. While distinct for the ‘trusted’, the ‘victim’ and the ‘risky’, as Bigo has shown, these categories are mutually constitutive: ‘exception works hand in hand with liberalism and gives the key to understanding its normal functioning, as soon as we avoid seeing exception as a sole matter of special laws’ (Bigo 2006). An account of the workings of the government of through community must therefore focus on how differentiated categorisations are enacted by differentiated techniques of organizing consent and coercion, and the way these organise and determine everyday interactions. Yet the most important question remains that of the effects of these categorisations and these techniques.

Divided and de-mobilised communities

A third proposition is that the government of counter-terrorism through community impacts community in at least two dimensions. Individually, it forces Muslims to occupy ambivalent subject positions through co-optation; collectively, it functions as a de-mobilizing structure.

At the individual level, the literature drawing on the notion of ‘suspect community’ has highlighted the effects of counter-terrorism on the ‘risky’ category, focusing mainly on insecurity, vulnerability and anger. Choudhury and Fenwick find that respondents consider the experience of being stopped and questioned at the airport stressful, even more so that street stops (2011, x). Police raids and police custody, even if the arrested are released without charge, are a source of anxiety and vulnerability (Choudhury and Fenwick 2011, 77). The repeated court appearances and unannounced police visits related to control orders are found to have a strong psychological impact on children and families (Brittain 2009, 5). Indefinite detention of foreign nationals, as practiced between 2001 and 2004 in the UK is found to have the most detrimental effect, causing serious mental health damage (Brittain 2009, 5). At best, these experiences are found to generate feelings of personal disconnection, exclusion and disenchantment about belonging (Lindekilde 2012). At worst, feelings of injustice engender anger and resentment (Fekete 2004; Mcdonald 2011; Mythen and Walklate 2009) The effects of ‘softer’, community-oriented approaches are less present in the literature. Spalek and Imtoual show that the pressure to become informants produces feelings of unease and alienation (2007). Yet currently no study has analysed the trajectories of ‘trusted’ Muslims who have benefited from counter-terrorism programmes to gain privileged political or administrative positions, unequivocally supporting governmental policies. Much remains to be written about the co-optation of those who shaped their career to respond to the demands of academics, police officers and social work administrators in need of ‘indigenous knowledge’. Similarly, very little exists on the ‘victim’ Muslims, who have successfully or unsuccessfully—in the eyes of the government—been ‘rehabilitated’. Preliminary research shows however that individual reactions range from satisfaction and feeling of recognition to conflicted loyalties and ethical dilemmas, which significantly complicate our understanding of the ambivalent individual effects of counter-terrorism. In terms of forms of solidarity, in opposition to the ‘suspect community's assumption of increased solidarity, the literature highlights mostly inter- and intra-community tensions, breakdown of trust with fellow community members, law enforcement and state authorities. Hard counter-terrorism, such as arrests and raids, are found to generate isolation and ostracism for affected families inside and outside the community. Choudhury documents the case of a family who experienced such arrests, whose children were bullied at school and abused in their neighbourhoods’ streets and shops (Choudhury and Fenwick 2011, 77). McGovern highlights that counter-terror operations also increase ethno-national tensions within the Muslim population (McGovern and Tobin 2010). Awan shows that operations such as the infiltration of Mosques or the covert CCTV monitoring of Muslim neighbourhoods significantly undermines trust between police and Muslim populations (Awan 2012).

Finally, the last hypothesis holds that counter-terrorism and counter-terrorism work predominantly as factor of political de-mobilisation. The confusion between community cohesion and counter-terrorist objectives of the Prevent policies has generated a critique of the empowered ‘trusted Muslim’ depicted as unelected, conservative, unrepresentative community leaders (Awan 2012; Spalek 2010, 796). These appointments are also perceived as a direct control of the life of the community (McGovern and Tobin 2010). As a result, voicing radical opinions becomes equated promoting extremism and terrorism (Kundnani 2009). While a small number of authors suggest that counter-terrorist policies might be conducive to violent radicalisation (Bigo and Bonelli 2008; Lindekilde 2012; Pantazis and Simon 2009), some highlight that parallel to the mechanism of victimisation, a mechanism of responsibility pushes some members of the communities to be more politically active (Lindekilde 2012; Mythen and Walklate 2009). This mechanism strengthens their Muslimness as a political identity, encourages Muslim societies to become more active, and opens doors to building coalitions with non-Muslim movements and organisations (Choudhury and Fenwick 2011). The literature has however not yet considered the aspects of the political influence of the ‘trusted Muslims’ beyond their illegitimate position. What are the political effects of their appointment? Are they mere ‘conduits’ of governmental power or do they deploy strategies of resistance? Similarly, to date, while some have documented the politics of Muslim associations, very few empirical studies have documented the politics of community underpinned in the resistance of the ‘victims’ and the ‘risky’ in relation to their targeting by counter-terrorism. Which forms of political mobilisation have they produced? Has the assimilationism promise of ‘muscular liberalism’ and therefore counter-terrorist and counter-radicalisation strategies come to simply mean co-optation?

Conclusion: towards policed multiculturalism?

To conclude, against the thesis that counter-terrorism produces a single ‘suspect community’, I have proposed to think about these policies as the enactment of a technique of government grounded in the differential and ambivalent treatment of Muslims as ‘trusted’, ‘victims’ and ‘risky’. In terms of the forms of management of diversity, while the ‘suspect community’ thesis reproduces in reverse the assumptions of the ‘muscular liberalism’ perspective, I have proposed an alternative interpretation. While discourses of politicians promote the dismissal of the multicultural model, in practice, much of the concrete, everyday routines of management of diversity have been retained, amended and modified. Indeed, if we understand multiculturalism as a ‘politics of recognition’ (Taylor, 1994), or a ‘differentiated citizenship’ (Kymlicka 1996), namely a modality of government at the core of which is the official recognition diversity, the hypothesis is that the current regime of management of Muslims bears a striking resemblance with its mechanisms, aims and objectives. Counter-terrorism, and in particular counter-radicalisation, by investing areas far beyond law enforcement, thus appears as a modality of management of diversity which is mainly a modification, adaptation and re-branding of practices that were developed during the heyday of multiculturalism. The critique of counter-radicalisation policies can therefore rehearse old critiques of multiculturalism, accused of contributing to the marginalisation of minorities by ‘keeping them off serious government policy agendas’; of functioning as a ‘divide and rule strategy’ (Barry 2002) reinforcing ethnic competition for funding and political influence; producing ‘misleading, tokenist and reifying view of communities as never-changing socially bounded entities’ (Vertovec 2010, 85). The difference between the previous iterations of multiculturalism, however, is that the institutional practices of policed multiculturalism practices are subordinated, in terms of their objectives, their funding, their delivery to imperatives of suspicion, security and counter-terrorism.

Rather than ‘muscular liberalism’ or the production of a ‘suspect community’, the conflation of the security logic and the differentialist practices of multiculturalism outlined in the last section can therefore be captured by the notion of ‘policed multiculturalism’. The promise of assimilation betrays practices of corporatism and co-optation. The specificity of ‘policed multiculturalism’, in this perspective is that the government through community removes political decisions related to the management of the ‘politics of recognition’ from political discussion by presenting them as matters of ‘security’, to be decided in governmental or bureaucratic circles by professionals of security. By curtailing the authorised political space to ‘trusted Muslim’ voices, policed multiculturalism produces the double effect of showing an authorised politics and hide the voices it silences. In other words, it enacts a neutralised space of discussion about Islam, terrorism, radicalisation, violence and religious freedom with political adversaries whose discourse is set and known in advance while simultaneously rejecting and discrediting dissenting voices as political enemies, either in the category of the ‘victims’ of propaganda and indoctrination, or that of the ‘dangerous’ to be banned an excluded. The danger of this mechanism, of course, is that along with racist, bigoted, violent voices, policed multiculturalism excludes and undermines the credibility non-violent and radical voices that can constitute the legitimate interlocutors of a truly equal politics of recognition. It is therefore precisely in the ability to categorise that resides the core of the political decision.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sandrine Bertaux and Murat Akan for organizing the workshop ‘Contextualizing Multiculturalism: Realities and Pitfalls’ that gave birth to this paper in April 2012. Many thanks as well as to Akil Awan, Didier Bigo, Laurent Bonelli, Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Richard Jackson, Lee Jarvis, Julien Jeandesboz, Peter Geschiere, Rizwan Sabir, Paul Thomas, Frank de Zwart, Sami Zemni and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Francesco Ragazzi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7876-6880

Notes

1. Section 44 was repealed in May 2012. Stop and search powers are limited to the section 43, which requires reasonable suspicion.

2. Action Plan Counter-Terrorism and Security (Actieplan Terrorismebestrijding en Veiligheid).

3. Crimes of Terrorism Act (Wet Terroristische Misdrijven).