Description
Attempts to bridge the gap between the domestic and the international in Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) discourse often focus on the processes and practices that migrate between the two spheres. However, this approach restricts the scope of enquiry to either states or international organisations. An alternative way of collapsing this divide is to explore the interplay of international and domestic security narratives at the grassroots level by turning our analytical gaze to the individual. Enloe’s intervention ‘the international is personal’ aimed to make women analytically visible in the study of politics. This paper will repurpose this statement to make the individual visible in the transversal universe of P/CVE politics.
Drawing on the personal experiences of ordinary citizens conducting counter-extremism surveillance under Prevent Duty in England, this paper will explore how the body of an individual becomes the terrain where the international and domestic security logics converge. The result manifests in ordinary interactions that turn into (in)security-making opportunities and spaces that turn into domestic outposts of the global war on terror. In this symbiotic process, the international sets the parameters of threats and risk and the domestic, in response, develops mitigating strategies that can be replicated across different borders and systems.
