Preventing radicalization in European cities: An urban geopolitical question

Abstract

With the intensification of attacks in European cities since 2014, preventing radicalization has become the main security strategy for fighting 'terrorism' in Europe and beyond. While the concern with radicalization in security policy was due to a realization that European cities are not just the target of but also increasingly the 'breeding ground' of terrorism, less attention has been paid to how radicalization prevention has changed the relations between European cities and war. Debates in critical security studies have remained a-spatial for the most part, focused on either the national or international scales, while the question of radicalization has not yet become a topic of scrutiny in the literature on urban geopolitics. Addressing this lacuna, I engage with the policy debates at the EU, urban, and regional levels as well as the role of the European Forum for Urban Security that eventually led to the first EU Mayors' conference on terrorism and radicalization in Brussels in March 2018. The core observation here is that, rather than another form of national security, radicalization prevention is an extension of counterinsurgency in European cities. This extension of the liberal way of war inside Europe is also accompanied by an increasing focus on urban geopolitics of danger, one that is the relational outcome of the assumed ungovernability of the Other at the urban and international scales and which blurs spaces of liberal peace and war. These developments point to the gradual incorporation of radicalization prevention into the processes of urban governance. INTRODUCTIONOn March 8, 2018, the European Commission (EC) and the Committee of Regions (CR) jointly held the first European Union (EU) Mayors' conference on terrorism behind closed doors in Brussels. 1 The conference, Building Urban Defences Against Terrorism, marked the first convergence of multi-scalar networks of European politicians, policymakers, and urban experts discussing radicalization prevention at the EU level. European mayors 2 and the EU parliamentary members 3 came together with members of two major EU think tanks, the Radicalization Awareness Network (RAN) and the European Forum for Urban Security (Efus), to examine four topics: "the role of cities in the fight against terrorism", "lessons learned from recent attacks", "security by design", and "cities against radicalization" (EC & CR, 2018).The Brussels conference marked the European Commission's (2018b, p. 2) official commitment to 1 Only the opening and closing remarks were broadcasted for journalists.

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“…Others insist that the megacities of the South -which appear as inherently, if not 'naturally,' violent -are bound to pull the U.S. military into armed intervention (Harris et al 2014). Military analysts apply this urban framework not only to cities of the Global South; they also understand unrests in the various settlement patterns of the Global North (the banlieues, ghettos, and estates) as symptomatic of a general crisis of urban governance (see Saberi 2019).…”