Description
Counter-terrorism responsibilities have been gradually dispersed across British society. The 2015 Prevent Duty mandated that all public sector workers must report so-called ‘signs of radicalization’ – such as “transitional periods” and “engagement with an ideology" – that their clients (schoolchildren and hospital patients) present. The most concerning referrals receive ‘de-radicalization’ mentoring on the Channel programme to preemptively steer them away from terrorism. This paper utilizes interviews with Prevent officials and Channel mentors, illuminating how (racialized) everyday lives, behaviours, and thoughts are made visible as potential terrorism risks through de-radicalization interventions. Rather than demonstrably ensuring security, pre-crime interventions instead operationalize and reproduce insecurity. De-radicalization practitioners reveal a constant state of freneticism and alertness central to their work: children presenting as harmless (in practitioners’ own words) are simultaneously imagined to be potential future terrorists, giving Prevent operatives sleepless nights. Banal, everyday behaviours and experiences – of being single, of being married, watching videos about geopolitics, having too much empathy – are all deemed possibly significant risk-factors to be anxiously dissected and managed before safety can be declared. Yet success is never complete, nor safety fully known. The drive to identify risk/safety is mobilized through profound insecurity, so that fears about the racialized unknown can be alleviated.
