Description
The emergence of preventing and countering violent extremism programmes in the early 2000s led to a shift in global security narratives and practices. After their first appearance in Europe, P/CVE measures rapidly spread worldwide (Kundnani and Ben Hayes, 2018). Many western and non-western countries adopted the conceptual framework of P/CVE to legitimise tight state control over suspect communities. A crucial feature of these measures is to enlist key community actors (such as social workers or religious educators) to monitor suspect individuals and groups (Bastani and Gazzotti 2021). This is also the case in Tunisia, where the 2016 national strategy against terrorism introduced the concept of preventive measures, legitimising tighter state control over religious discourses and practices. To bring a decolonial perspective to the study of preventative measures in the country, I build upon the concept of ‘vernacular security’(Bubandt 2005; Croft and Vaughn-Williams 2016; Lee 2019) to examine how Tunisian imams involved in P/CVE programmes understand security, violent extremism, radicalisation, and their role as non-traditional security actors. To achieve this, I observe how imams describe their own experiences of security, in their own words and through their understanding. Through ethnographic interviews conducted with local imams between 2019 and 2020, this paper focuses on the way in which they perceive, re-enact and influence security practices, with a particular focus on the relationship between religion and security, a central subject in post-revolutionary Tunisia. In so doing, this paper argues that local imams involved in P/CVE programmes reproduce local and global security discourses, while at the same time refraining from their role in community policing.
