Hold Your Friends Close: Countering Radicalisation in Britain and America
Hold Your Friends Close: Countering Radicalisation in Britain and America
Oxford University Press (in press)
Why did the UK Home Office fund a football competition between police and young British Muslims from its counterterrorism budget? Why does the US Department of Homeland Security fund debates on citizenship practices for young Somali-Americans? Why has the UK repeatedly threatened to fine giant US technology companies for failing to remove terrorist content? These measures, known as counterradicalisation, are a novel development in post 9/11 counterterrorism policies. Their effectiveness is impossible to measure and they differ in important ways from other, more traditional approaches to counterterrorism such as extended detention, no-fly lists and criminal charges. Why have governments charged with the sober task of counterterrorism in the post 9/11 era taken such unusual, ‘soft’ approaches to this aspect of the problem? Taking an interpretivist approach and drawing on interviews with senior policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic, this book undertakes three tasks. First, it defines counterradicalisation and the problem it purports to address, homegrown extremism, in terms of political community, situating the concept in in citizenship theory and in the broader International Relations literature on state formation. In doing so it traces ideas of political community in jihadi strategic writings in the context of Bourdeisuan approaches to symbolic violence. Second, it undertakes a broad survey of counterradicalisation policies in Muslim majority and Muslim minority states, drawing out commonalities which differentiate these policies from more traditional counterterrorism measures. Third, it undertakes a detailed policy history of counterradicalisation in the US and the UK. It outlines the sociolegal history of political community in each jurisdiction, the history of counterradicalisation legislation, and the history of counterradicalisation approaches. It situates this analysis in the context of shifts in the practices of homegrown extremism, including the increasingly important role of the online environment in such acts.