Charlotte Heath-Kelly

Counter-Terrorism and the Counterfactual: Producing the ‘Radicalisation’ Discourse and the UK PREVENT Strategy

This article interrogates the production of the ‘radicalisation’ discourse which underpins efforts to govern ‘terrorism’ pre-emptively through the UKs PREVENT strategy. British counter-terrorism currently relies upon the invention of ‘radicalisation’ and related knowledge about transitions to ‘terrorism’ to undertake governance of communities rendered suspicious. The article argues that such conceptions make terrorism knowable and governable through conceptions of risk. Radicalisation knowledge provides a counterfactual to terrorism—enabling governmental intervention in its supposed production. It makes the future actionable. However, while the deployment of ‘radicalisation’ functions to make terrorism pre-emptively governable and knowable, it also renders PREVENT unstable by simultaneously presenting ‘vulnerability indicatorsfor radicalisation as threats to the wider collective—these conducts are framed as both ‘at risk’ and ‘risky’, both vulnerable and dangerous. This instability speaks to ad hoc production of the radicalisation discourse by scholarly and policy-making communities for the governance of terrorism through radicalisation knowledge. This article analyses the production of the radicalisation discourse to explore its performance as a form of risk governance within British counter-terrorism.

Reinventing prevention or exposing the gap? False positives in UK terrorism governance and the quest for pre-emption

This article considers the developments within UK counterterrorism strategy between the Prevention of Terrorism Acts (PTAs) and the recent (2011) reworking of CONTEST. It argues that the performance of prevention within British counterterrorism policy has changed to favour pre-emptive measures, deployed in accordance with knowledge produced about terrorism ‘risk’. However, this shift has been accompanied by the continuation of certain practices of pre-emption. The article integrates the studies of ‘suspect communities’ created by counterterrorism practices into its discussion of risk, elucidating how the production of risky subjectivities has enabled the practice of ‘preventative’ force upon both Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and contemporary terrorist suspects. The article focuses on these articulations of risky communities, highlighting how they lead to ‘false positives’ in the identification of terrorists and the use of sovereign force (like the death of Jean Charles de Menezes or the assassination of PIRA suspects in Gibraltar) by painting certain racial characteristics and behaviours as imminently dangerous. The article connects the production of suspect communities to the presence of pre-emptive logics within counterterrorism discourse, logics that have consistently produced a ‘gap’ between the terrorist event and its pre-emption, between the suspect community and the figure of the terrorist, then. This ‘gap’ leads to the use of force upon innocent persons – who are temporarily rendered guilty by visualities of ‘suspectness’. As such, the apparent novelty of pre-emptive terrorism governance within British policy framing does not reflect a similar discontinuity in the practice of counterterrorism then – which has consistently deployed suspect communities and produced ‘false positives’ within a politics of pre-emption.

Critical Terrorism Studies, Critical Theory and the ‘Naturalistic Fallacy’

This article problematizes how Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) utilizes Coxian and Frankfurt School Critical Theory to support an emancipatory project. The article broadly takes the example of CTS to illustrate the dangers of the ‘pearl fishing’ method, occasionally used within critical international relations, where a section of a philosophical position is appropriated without regard for the whole. As Horkheimerian Critical Theory relies upon a far broader philosophy than CTS acknowledges, it is argued that the appropriated emancipatory foundation cannot make sense in soundbite form. Such stunted interaction with the wider philosophy of Critical Theory leaves CTS susceptible to the charge of logical error, specifically that contained in the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. The naturalistic fallacy is a charge drawn from the philosophy of logic that takes improper derivation of ‘ought’ from ‘is’ within argumentation as its referent. The relationship between international relations and Critical Theory does not have to be so unsatisfactory, however, and this article concludes with suggestions for a route whereby emancipatory commitment might be adopted without such problems of normative origination.

Securing through the failure to secure? The ambiguity of resilience at the bombsite

Resilience discourses resignify uncertainty and insecurity as the means to attain security. Security failure is resignified as productive and becomes part of the story about security learning and improvements in anticipatory capability. In this article, I explore questions of failure mediation and ‘securing through insecurity’. If resilience policies suggest that failure and insecurity can be mediated and redeployed in the cause of success, what becomes of visceral sites of security failure such as the terrorist bombsite? This article focuses on a site where security agencies failed to prevent the bombing of a packed nightclub in Bali, in order to explore ambiguity of failure in the resilience era. It considers the efforts of politicians and activists to perform the site as resilient, and the spatial and temporal excess which eludes this performance. The article contributes to critical literatures on resilience by showing, through the ambiguities of resilience at the bombsite, that resilience is a chimera with regards to its supposed incorporation of insecurity.

Algorithmic autoimmunity in the NHS : radicalisation and the clinic

This article explores the extension of counter-radicalisation practice into the National Health Service (NHS). In the 2011 reformulation of the UK Prevent strategy, the NHS became a key sector for the identification and suppression of ‘radicalisation’. Optometrists, dentists, doctors and nurses have been incorporated into counter-terrorism and trained to report signs of radicalisation in patients and staff. This article explores how calculative modalities associated with big data and digital analytics have been translated into the non-digital realm. The surveillance of the whole of the population through the NHS indicates a dramatic policy shift away from linear profiling of those ‘suspect communities’ previously considered vulnerable to radicalisation. Fixed indicators of radicalisation and risk profiles no longer reduce the sample size for surveillance by distinguishing between risky and non-risky bodies. Instead, the UK government chose the NHS as a pre-eminent site for counter-terrorism because of the large amount of contact it has with the public. The UK government is developing a novel counter-terrorism policy in the NHS around large-N surveillance and inductive calculation, which demonstrates a translation of algorithmic modalities and calculative regimes. This article argues that this translation produces an autoimmune moment in British security discourse whereby the distinction between suspicious and non-suspicious bodies has collapsed. It explores the training provided to NHS staff, arguing that fixed profiles no longer guide surveillance: rather, surveillance inductively produces the terrorist profile.

The geography of pre-criminal space: epidemiological imaginations of radicalisation risk in the UK Prevent Strategy, 2007–2017

ABSTRACT This article explores geographical and epistemological shifts in the deployment of the UK Prevent strategy, 2007–2017. Counter-radicalisation policies of the Labour governments (2006–2010) focused heavily upon resilience-building activities in residential communities. They borrowed from historical models of crime prevention and public health to imagine radicalisation risk as an epidemiological concern in areas showing a 2% or higher demography of Muslims. However, this racialised and localised imagination of pre-criminal space was replaced after the election of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010. Residential communities were then de-emphasised as sites of risk, transmission and pre-criminal intervention. The Prevent Duty now deploys counter-radicalisation through national networks of education and health-care provision. Localised models of crime prevention (and their statistical, crime prevention epistemologies) have been de-emphasised in favour of big data inflected epistemologies of inductive, population-wide “safeguarding”. Through the biopolitical discourse of “safeguarding vulnerable adults”, the Prevent Duty has radically reconstituted the epidemiological imagination of pre-criminal space, imagining that all bodies are potentially vulnerable to infection by radicalisers and thus warrant surveillance.

Editors’ introduction: critical terrorism studies: practice, limits and experience

The articles in this special issue are drawn from papers presented at a conference titled Critical Terrorism Studies: Practice, Limits and Experience. The conference was organised by the Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group of the British International Studies Association (BISA). The event was supported by both a BISA workshop grant and by Loughborough University’s Centre for the Study of International Governance (CSIG) and was held at Loughborough University from 9–10 September 2013. The conference aimed to explore what we know about terrorism and counterterrorism and importantly to ask how we know it. Reflecting the recent “materialist”, “everyday”, “experiential” and “narrative” turns in the fields of International Relations (IR), Geography and Cultural Theory, the event brought together scholars and practitioners to reflect on practices of research and knowledge production in Critical Terrorism Studies and related fields. The articles in this special issue reflect those aims.

Editors’ introduction: neoliberalism and/as terror

The articles in this special issue are drawn from papers presented at a conference entitled “Neoliberalism and/as Terror”, held at the Nottingham Conference Centre at Nottingham Trent University by the Critical Terrorism Studies BISA Working Group (CSTWG) on 15–16 September 2014. The conference was supported by both a BISA workshop grant and supplementary funds from Nottingham Trent University’s Politics and International Relations Department and the Critical Studies on Terrorism journal. Papers presented at the conference aimed to extend research into the diverse linkages between neoliberalism and terrorism, including but extending beyond the contextualisation of pre-emptive counterterrorism technologies and privatised securities within relevant economic and ideological contexts. Thus, the conference sought also to stimulate research into the ways that neoliberalism could itself be understood as terrorism, asking – amongst other questions – whether populations are themselves terrorised by neoliberal policy. The articles presented in this special issue reflect the conference aims in bringing together research on the neoliberalisation of counterterrorism and on the terror of neoliberalism.

Death and security

Making a bold intervention into critical security studies literature, this book explores the ontological relationship between mortality and security. It considers the mortality theories of Heidegger and Bauman alongside literature from the sociology of death, before undertaking a comparative exploration of the memorialisation of four prominent post-terrorist sites: the World Trade Centre in New York, the Bali bombsite, the London bombings and the Norwegian sites attacked by Anders Breivik. n nBy interviewing the architects and designers of these reconstruction projects, the book shows that practices of memorialisation are a retrospective security endeavour - they conceal and re-narrate the traumatic incursion of death. Disaster recovery is replete with security practices that return mortality to its sublimated position and remove the disruption posed by mortality to political authority. The book will be of significant interest to academics and postgraduates working in the fields of critical security studies, memory studies and international politics.

Building a New Utøya; Re-Placing the Oslo Bombsite—Counterfactual Resilience at Postterrorist Sites

ABSTRACT Resilience strategies aim to build “resilience” before disasters strike; utilizing preemptive techniques to predict emergencies and prepare systems to manage their consequences. But what can we learn about resilience from responses to disasters that have already happened? This article draws on fieldwork at postterrorist sites in Norway: the Oslo Government Quarter and Utøya island. While resilience policy develops plans for infrastructural recovery after the next disaster, the curators of postterrorist sites rebuild and reclaim existing disaster space. They apply a retrospective framing of recovery. The article explores this work and questions its absence from policy understandings of resilience.