Reinventing prevention or exposing the gap? False positives in UK terrorism governance and the quest for pre-emption

Abstract

This article considers the developments within UK counterterrorism strategy between the Prevention of Terrorism Acts (PTAs) and the recent (2011) reworking of CONTEST. It argues that the performance of prevention within British counterterrorism policy has changed to favour pre-emptive measures, deployed in accordance with knowledge produced about terrorism ‘risk’. However, this shift has been accompanied by the continuation of certain practices of pre-emption. The article integrates the studies of ‘suspect communities’ created by counterterrorism practices into its discussion of risk, elucidating how the production of risky subjectivities has enabled the practice of ‘preventative’ force upon both Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and contemporary terrorist suspects. The article focuses on these articulations of risky communities, highlighting how they lead to ‘false positives’ in the identification of terrorists and the use of sovereign force (like the death of Jean Charles de Menezes or the assassination of PIRA suspects in Gibraltar) by painting certain racial characteristics and behaviours as imminently dangerous. The article connects the production of suspect communities to the presence of pre-emptive logics within counterterrorism discourse, logics that have consistently produced a ‘gap’ between the terrorist event and its pre-emption, between the suspect community and the figure of the terrorist, then. This ‘gap’ leads to the use of force upon innocent persons – who are temporarily rendered guilty by visualities of ‘suspectness’. As such, the apparent novelty of pre-emptive terrorism governance within British policy framing does not reflect a similar discontinuity in the practice of counterterrorism then – which has consistently deployed suspect communities and produced ‘false positives’ within a politics of pre-emption.

Keywords:

• counterterrorism
• prevention
• pre-emption
• CONTEST
• petty sovereign
• risk
• suspect communities

Acknowledgements

I thank the two anonymous reviewers who greatly improved this article with their insightful critiques. This would be a much poorer article if they had not contributed their thoughts.

Notes

1. Although similar to the PTAs in content, the 2000 legislation dropped the moniker of ‘prevention’ and was named the ‘Terrorism Act 2000’. I am treating the Terrorism Act as a continuation of the PTAs due to the similarities in content between them.

2. I am going to trouble this distinction between anticipatory governance and sovereign power later in the article. However, for now, I am utilising Mitchell Dean's distinction to contrast the heavy-handed criminal justice approach to the Northern Irish ‘troubles’ with the re-educational community-based approach to contemporary ‘radicalisation’.

3. The interpretation of ‘reasonable force’ leading to the taking away of life is not addressed here, but will be noted in the Section ‘Petty sovereigns and false positives.’

4. Claudia Aradau has written on the dynamic interaction of discourses of risk and pity in the context of trafficked persons (see Aradau 2004).

5. For a dissenting opinion on the analytic utility of the term ‘suspect community’, see Greer (2010).

6. The phrase used relates to protecting young people from ‘harm or from causing harm’.