Description
The Prevent Strategy places a legal obligation on specified authorities to monitor people for signs of radicalisation and to keep them from being drawn into terrorism. This duty to conduct counter-terrorism policing within civic spaces has the dual effect of turning one section of society into ‘agents of state’ and another into suspects. The bifurcation is cemented further with calls for every ‘good citizen to be a counter-terrorism citizen’ (N. Basu, 2018). This paper will argue that Prevent is recalibrating the citizenship practice to turn citizens into moderate subjects who see counter-terrorism surveillance as their civic duty.
To explore the securitisation of citizenship practice, this paper will use neoliberal governmentality to unpack how the rationality of Prevent, rooted in risk and radicalisation, is operationalised by shifting responsibilities to citizens. This framing is complemented by citizenship literature to explain how communitarian ideas of active citizenry serve as tools of population management. The point of intersection between these two literatures provides the foundation to analyse how Prevent has become diffused within civic life and repurposed the technologies of conduct control embedded within citizenship practice. This analysis is taken forward with findings from semi-structured interviews conducted with doctors, teachers, and social workers, to understand how civilians tasked with implementing the Prevent Duty conceptualise their duty to the state and their fellow citizens with reference to their new security obligations. By studying citizens who have unwittingly been turned into ‘agents of state’, this paper will present a new perspective on the expansion of the state’s security infrastructure and emergence of a new form of subjectivity rooted in citizenship practice.
