Counter-Radicalisation Policy and the Securing of British Identity: The Politics of Prevent by Thomas Martin

Author:Thomas Martin [Martin, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Government, Public Policy, Education, General, Educational Policy & Reform, Social Science, Political Science, Sociology, Law Enforcement, Law, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9781526140111
Google: t3S5DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 55404904
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2019-04-16T07:48:27+00:00

Identity and (preclusive) security

It must, of course, be recognised, that to posit an intrinsic relation between security and identity is not new. Such an analysis has been a mainstay of post-structuralist scholarship in International Relations, which has, since its emergence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, drawn attention to the means through which practices of security have been productive of state identities (see, for example, Ashley, 1988; Connolly, 1991; Walker, 1993; Campbell, 1998a). The starting point here is that, through designating that which is outside, states are, in fact, performing particular identities, that carry with them exclusions and boundary-drawing processes. Ontologically, there can be no pre-figurative ‘I’ that acts out a response to an objective and external other. Rather, it is in the process of articulating and performing threats, that the ‘I’ and its outside are produced. As Campbell demonstrates, this demands that the practices of International Relations are not those of pre-existing, ahistorical entities that interact across, and with reference to, pre-given boundaries. Rather, analytical concern must be towards the processes and practices that establish boundaries between the internal state and external international (Campbell, 1998a: 61). Therefore, to understand the identity of the ‘British’ state, the processes through which it produces, performs and secures itself against its outside must be examined. Such boundary-producing practices are often the product of ascriptions of danger or threat to that which is considered other, establishing the internal community as normalised, safe and coherent, in opposition to the dangerous outside.

Within this context, the term ‘preclusive identity politics’ serves to bring together literatures on security-temporality and security-identity, signifying that Prevent produces an account of identity in the present that makes intelligible future threats to security. Prevent, to this reading, can be situated as productive of the boundary between that which is designated as ‘British’, and therefore secure, and that which is designated as outside. Prevent should thus be read not as the securing of an extant, and pre-existing ‘British’ identity, but rather, it is through Prevent that this ‘Britishness’, and that which is alienated from and outside it, is produced. Through Prevent, certain identities are produced as risky on account of the potential they are deemed to contain for the future. At an abstract level, Prevent is a process where certain identities are ordered as risky, and this riskiness is understood to be constituted by an alienation from ‘Britishness’ and ‘British values’. Prevent thus orders identities in the present. Certain identities are produced as external to a ‘Britishness’ and thus risky, others are normalised as ‘British’ and secure. In this abstracted understanding of Prevent, the content of what may or may not be ‘British’ recedes in importance. The point is that Prevent produces, through its security acts and ascriptions, certain identities as alienated from ‘Britishness’, and thus risky and in need of securing. It is, therefore, through the security act of Prevent that identities not considered as containable within ‘Britishness’ or ‘British values’ are produced and ascribed. These ‘acts’ can be understood both in

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