This violence good, that violence bad: normative and state-centric discourses in British school textbooks

ABSTRACT

Under the statutory obligations of the Prevent strategy, British schools have greater responsibility to counter terrorism and extremism than ever before. However, research has yet to fully explore how schools tackle such a complex issue in the classroom. This research critically examines the discourses of terrorism and extremism found within British secondary school textbooks to deepen understanding of how terrorism and extremism are taught in schools. This article deploys a mode of critical discourse analysis to assess and critique the ways in which the political realms of terrorism and extremism are constructed. I argue that these discourses construct an ethical proximity between the text, the reader and the state, while rendering voiceless both the “terrorist” and the civilian living in states prioritised by British foreign policy. As such, this article argues that British school textbooks construct a normative perspective through which the violence of states is sanitised and normalised. It raises concern regarding the role of contemporary schooling in perpetuating a global politics of violent foreign policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• extremism
• discourse
• school textbooks
• state violence

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, whose Research Fellowship Programme supported the completion of this research. I would also like to thank Eleni Christodoulou, Richard Jackson, and Simona Szakacs, alongside the three anonymous reviewers, whose comments on earlier drafts of the article have contributed enormously.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A greater number of themes could have been included, though space restrictions inhibit their inclusion. In particular, I hope to draw on two further themes in future research: the threat of terrorism and extremism discourses to political activism through the discursive linkage of terrorism and protest, and second, the comparative lack of attention given to extremism rather than terrorism within these texts, despite the far greater emphasis given to schools to counter extremism, rather than terrorism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kieran Ford

Kieran Ford is a PhD student, whose doctoral research focuses oneducational approaches to countering terrorism. Current researchinterests include: critical approaches to terrorism and extremism;the rise of the far-right, and non-violent approaches to countering extremism.