Description
The policing of the UK’s Muslim population through counter-terrorism and social policy practice has been subject to extensive examination and critique in recent years. Specifically, scholarship has attended to the multiple and proliferating ways in which the Prevent strategy in particular as a form of racialised bordering, policing Muslim subjects as outside of and threatening to white Britain. However, what has not been adequately explored is how the policing of Muslim populations both anticipated and happened alongside the increasingly intensified racial border work directed at other minoritised groups embodied in the so-called hostile environment. This paper brings together an analysis of Prevent on the one hand, and the hostile environment on the other, as intimately connected and mutually reinforcing examples of racial border work. At a time when Britain is convulsed by intersecting crises embodied in austerity and Brexit, casting out those who are not adequately ‘British’, who are rendered as threatening to the primacy and privileges of the more ‘deserving’ (white) British people, a return to better days is made conceivable. This paper shows how Prevent has contributed to the much broader and insidious campaign of policing Britain’s minoritised groups through racialised border work.
