Preventing Citizenship: Islamophobia, Countering Violent Extremism and the case of the Prevent Policy in the UK

Researchers in fields as wide ranging as Terrorism Studies, Defense and Security Studies, Sociology of ethnicities, Anthropology, Legal studies, and International Relations have helped to build up an extensive literature on contemporary radicalization of Muslims and the policies needed to counter this. These studies have been informed by a variety of epistemologies and deployed a range of methods to investigate and improve Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) policies and their impact on Muslim communities. Many of these studies have demonstrated excellent scholarship, however, the problem this thesis addresses arises from the conception of CVE itself.

There remains a particular anomaly in the tendency to see countering violent extremism in very narrow terms. This requires a broadening out of CVE in terms of the formal and informal aspects of how a policy like Prevent shapes the culture within society, citizenship and sense of belonging rather than just focusing on legal norms. This is why we need to understand prevent as a discourse in order to map out the effects on a culture that has now become part of everyday existence.
This thesis investigates the Prevent policy, the training to carry out the now incumbent duty, and the impact of its implementation on the Muslim community. This is achieved through analyzing the policy document and associated literature using decolonial discourse theory. The analysis of the training for Prevent is undertaken in the style of auto-ethnographic study in order to understand the transformation of behaviour of those tasked with carrying out Prevent. Furthermore, the genre of literature designed to support the implementation of the policy will be examined by looking at the works of comprador commentators such as Ed Husain and Sara Khan. Prevent is shown to be an extension of colonial racial modes of governance and in doing so acknowledges the impact of Orientalist and Eurocentric perspectives. This is approached through a decolonial discourse theory and through the lens of Critical Muslim Studies as a means of understanding Prevent as a discourse rooted in racialized notions of British Values.

This thesis proposes that the problems with Prevent are not methodological failures but rather epistemological, as Prevent relies upon Orientalist and Islamophobic principles taken from colonial forms of governance. This thesis will reflect on how Prevent and its expansion has led to enacting two-tiered citizenship that rests on a racialization of citizens and prejudices the Muslim community.