Radicalisation, Counter-Radicalisation, and Prevent - by Lee Jarvis & Andrew Whiting & Stuart MacDonald (Paperback)

About the Book

This book offers urgent exploration of how 'ordinary' citizens understand and make sense of radicalisation and counter-radicalisation policy.

Book Synopsis

This book offers the first sustained investigation into non-elite understandings of radicalisation and counter-radicalisation policy. Drawing on original focus group research with students from universities across England and Wales, the book explores how 'ordinary' citizens understand radicalisation, how they make sense of counter-radicalisation initiatives like the UK Prevent Strategy, and how they evaluate its functioning and effects across society. Radicalisation, counter-radicalisation and Prevent demonstrates that these non-elite insights often contradict and diverge from traditional (elite) security knowledge and thus shed new light on wider questions around the politics of security. This has vitally important implications not only for counter-radicalisation and counter-terrorism policy but for the very study and practice of security.

From the Back Cover

Radicalisation, counter-radicalisation and Prevent offers a much-needed analysis of how 'ordinary' citizens make sense of 'radicalisation' as a security challenge, and how efforts to address this threat via counter-radicalisation initiatives are understood.

Counter-radicalisation initiatives, such as the UK Prevent Strategy, are controversial and heavily critiqued by academics, the media and community groups. Such criticism, however, remains limited because it rarely engages with the vernacular analyses of those potentially subject to such measures. To remedy this, the book draws on significant focus group research with students from universities across England and Wales to establish how radicalisation is understood in vernacular discourse; to explore competing understandings of the Prevent Strategy, its aspirations, and implementation; and to consider how those who have become a focus of the strategy feel about its design, implementation and social consequences. The book shows that vernacular constructions of (counter-)radicalisation demonstrate important ambiguities and contradictions within commonly held assumptions about the meaning, possibility and desirability of security policy. These ambiguities are vitally important not only for understanding counter-radicalisation and counter-terrorism, but for the study and practice of security more broadly.

The book will be essential reading for students, scholars and practitioners working on such issues across fields including politics, criminology, law, international relations, sociology and beyond.

Review Quotes

'In their timely new book, Jarvis, Macdonald, and Whiting offer a rich and nuanced analysis of the vernacular understandings and experiences of counter-radicalization initiatives such as the UK's controversial Prevent program. What emerges is a complex picture in which the language of radicalization retains conceptual resilience despite profound criticisms, and the strategy itself elicits both support and frustration from citizens who both recognize the security challenge confronted yet remain sceptical of the framework employed to address it. This book makes multiple important contributions, methodologically in its application of 'vernacular security', analytically in its revealing of everyday politics, and normatively in providing space for subjugated narratives on this divisive arena of public policy. It deserves to become essential reading for scholars across political science, legal studies, sociology, criminology, and beyond with interests in critical security studies, counter-terrorism, and citizenship.'
Tahir Abbas, Professor of Radicalisation Studies, Leiden University, Netherlands

'This book is the first of its kind to interrogate the various ways in which ordinary people understand radicalisation as a concept within the UK, and it explores what they make of government policies and interventions such as Prevent. Its 'bottom-up' approach corrects the elitist tendencies within existing work on radicalisation and violent extremism. The book will be very valuable to students, academics and practitioners who are interested in what people know about radicalisation and violent extremism and the claims that they make in their engagement with 'top-down' policies and discourses.'
Akin Oyawale, University of Warwick

'Counter-radicalisation policies are increasingly fundamental to the provision of national security. To be successful, they also, crucially, rely upon public support and engagement. As the first sustained analysis of citizen understandings of radicalisation and counter-radicalisation this book will be essential reading for policymakers, practitioners and others seeking to understand how programmes like Prevent are experienced and evaluated in everyday life within the United Kingdom and beyond.'
Anne Aly, Member of the Australian Parliament

About the Author

Lee Jarvis is Professor of Security and Society at Adelaide University
Stuart Macdonald is Professor of Law at Swansea University
Andrew Whiting is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London