Description
This paper analyses the establishment and implementation of CVE across Europe, revealing how programmes designed to prevent terrorism risk from emerging are enacted through systematic acts of forgetting. Examining the establishment of terrorism preemption programmes in the UK, Norway, and the Western Balkans, the paper articulates how significantly disastrous periods and moments of violence – “the Troubles”, the Utøya attack in 2011, and the Yugoslav Wars respectively – did not provoke CVE to be enacted, despite these episodes of violence being characterised by continuity rather than exceptionality. Instead, the domain of CVE across Europe was established only after much smaller-scale violence perpetrated by, and the perceived threat of violence from, racialized Muslims. The paper also investigates how the racialized policy enactment of CVE is mapped onto the day-to-day implementation of such programmes, through analysis of 17 interviews with officials from the UK’s counter-radicalization strategy Prevent and its ‘de-radicalization’ intervention scheme Channel. The discussion argues that the policy paradigm of CVE is only able to be upheld by the consistent forgetting of systemic and White violence, which in turn enables much more destructive forms of violence (from environmental exploitation to austerity politics) to be situated as the norm.
