Description
Over the past decade, Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) has emerged as a new frontier in the War on Terror. The British government’s Prevent Strategy has been amongst the foremost proponents of this approach to combating terrorism. This policing moves quotidian counter-terrorism work beyond law enforcement structures and places these obligations directly on citizens. This paper problematises the interactions of these civilian ‘agents of state’ to their counter-terrorism obligations.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with medics, educators, and social workers, this paper argues that while there is compliance with Prevent Duty measures, there is also resistance to these civilian-led surveillance duties. It is important to explore this contestation because it opens up new ways of tackling the threat of terrorism. This paper will demonstrate that contestation by citizens does not mean outrightly rejecting the need to combat terrorism. Instead, citizens resisting Prevent reclaim the existing safeguarding principles embedded within their professional obligations to support people that the policy would consider ‘vulnerable to extremism’. As such, these acts of contestation create a new technology of prevention that challenges the orthodox notions of threat and vulnerability and moves away from the oppressive structures of War on Terror.
