Prevent Duty and the Securitisation of Citizenship

In 2018, Metropolitan Police's Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, called on all good citizens to be ‘counter-terrorism citizens’. This statement signals an expansion of the state’s coercive sphere and raises the question: how do ordinary citizens operate as ‘counter-terrorism citizens’? This research investigates this question by studying the lived experiences of ordinary citizens who have to enact the Prevent Duty as part of their professional roles. Prevent Duty puts a legal obligation on frontline staff working in health, education, and social work sectors to conduct counter-terrorism monitoring. If we study Prevent enactment only as a professional obligation, we cannot understand how individuals engage with this policy as ‘citizens’ and come to perceive their surveillance roles as civic duty. To capture these dynamics, this research argues we should analyse Prevent through the framework of securitised citizenship. This not only helps us understand how the state shifts security responsibilities to citizens but also tells us how citizens respond to these obligations. Through these responses we can find out whether citizens want to be counter-terrorism citizens and how they carry out these duties. The empirical findings of this research demonstrate that engagement with Prevent is diverse and can range from eager compliance to vocal resistance. People’s decisions are influenced by a variety of factors and in some instances, they agree to comply or resist the policy against their initial instincts. As such, within citizens’ engagement with Prevent Duty, we find a variety of narratives clashing with each other, yielding a messy lived reality where civic agency is diffused with subjection and vice versa. However, within these contradictory dynamics, we can observe an overwhelming concern for the safety of others and the recognition that citizens have a civic responsibility to protect each other. The dominance of this narrative has allowed the state to slowly expand its counter-terrorism framework and co-opt different sections of the society within it.