Securitising Education to Prevent Terrorism or Losing Direction?

Abstract

This article examines the growing relationship between security and education, particularly in the light of the UK government's Prevent Duty that seeks to tackle radicalisation in a variety of milieus, including universities. However, rather than seeing this process as being merely one-way, through a so-called securitisation of education (in the parlance of the Copenhagen School of International Relations), what is explored here is the dialectic between these two spheres. It is suggested that a heightened sensitivity to the supposed consequences of inflammatory rhetoric on the well-being of supposedly suggestible or vulnerable students has been in existence within education for quite some time. In that regards, the securitising efforts of politicians and officials are pushing against an open door. What's more, it is proposed that the inability of the authorities to hold the line in support of absolute freedom of expression, within academia and beyond, tacitly encourages the very people the government would hope to detract.

The counter-terrorist campus: Securitisation theory and university securitisation – Three Models

“…Such types of securitisation -for this is inevitably how they must be defined -has encountered impassioned oppositions from many academic quarters, from university institutions and academic community alike (Durodie 2016;Glees 2015). These concerns, tensions and resistances to securitisation are also integral to security and intelligence studies as a discipline.…”

“…Thus, because the Prevent Agenda aims to prevent radicalisation and counter extremism, its critics will say -again universallythat far from providing security for British life, it undermines it by alienating Muslim majorities, the emphasis on 'fundamental British values', which the Prevent programme also espouses simply further distancing people from them, often to the point of scorn and derision as to the notion of British values themselves (see Richardson 2015). Among the few senior UK academics who challenge this scepticism is Glees (2015) for which exercise of academic free expression he has been subject to criticism (Durodie 2016). …”

Contagious ideas: vulnerability, epistemic injustice and counter-terrorism in education

“…It does not investigate, as Scott Atran, (2015) suggests, the idealism, desire for justice, quest for meaning, compassion, and utopianism that often motivate young people, including those who join groups like ISIS, nor does it take seriously the expression of foreign policy grievances including the deaths of tens of thousands of people as a consequence of conflicts that involve the UK, the US and others. The effect of this particular image of vulnerability is to silence and to create self-doubt and fear (Durodié, 2016;Choudhury & Fenwick, 2011). Indeed, Coppock and McGovern argue that 'vulnerability is framed within specific, and again deeply problematic, conceptions of young people's mental health and well-being' and this means that young British Muslims are being 'rendered as appropriate objects for state intervention and surveillance ' (2014, p. 242).…”

“…The use of such indicators prevails despite strong arguments made against the very concept of radicalisation by experts in terrorism studies, such as Horgan (2014) who consistently maintains that it is impossible to predict who will become a terrorist, even if one can describe how people may become terrorists. Indeed, Durodié (2016) writing about contemporary education states that the practices inaugurated with Prevent and Channel amount to the 'therapeutisation of security' .…”

Framing the UK’s counter-terrorism policy within the context of a wicked problem

“…In addition, there is also the issue of whether those organizations also have the capabilities (as well as the commitment) in terms of identifying earlystage radicalization and reporting those concerns to the police. This is an issue of particular concern within education where debating extremist views is seen as an essential part of countering them (Brown and Saeed, 2015;Davies, 2016;Durodie, 2016;Saeed and Johnson, 2016). Maintaining awareness within and between these various organizations is also likely to be problematic and expensive to implement.…”