counter-extremism across borders
counter-extremism across borders
"CVE represents a qualitative expansion of policing, not – as it is sometimes imagined – a ‘soft’ alternative to it."
📝 Monthly Round-Up
Chinese Islamophobia was made in the West, Mobashra Tazamal — “Under the guise of preventing terrorism, governments have been able to institute discriminatory and deadly policies targeting Muslim communities.”
The 9/11 Complex: The Political Economy of Counter-Terrorism, Azfar Shafi — “The figure of the ‘Third World’ asylum seeker blurred almost seamlessly into that of the ‘terrorist’, and the police powers for monitoring and controlling both largely overlapped.”
The Gloabilisation of Countering Violent Extremism Policies, Arun Kundnani & Ben Hayes — “Through the development of CVE, the war on terror has given itself a new vocabulary and a wider set of partnering agencies, from educators to artists.”
Most people know that the World — and the oppressions upon which it rests — are interconnected. Which means saying that the counter-extremism industry is global is accepted well enough. However, there is a difference between knowing of a concept and understanding it. We know people have veins. Do all of us understand the intricacies of how blood circulates, though?
Most of NAZAR’s readers are based in the U.S. Speaking as someone also here, it’s easy to fall into positioning the U.S. as the center of the universe. Even when this isn’t done in celebration, it’s a problem. In a report on France’s counter-extremism, CAGE, an advocacy organization based in the United Kingdom, noted that “states have often tapped into their own specific cultural histories and vocabulary to help cement and normalise their policies.”
If the U.S. is viewed as the center of counter-extremism — and not part of an entanglement — then there’s often a failure to account for the “specific cultural values, histories, and dominant ideologies” of a nation impacting its policies. People may not know how to read the policies and programs they find as a result. Or, they may not even peep counter-extremism elsewhere because they don’t know what to look for.
Because I know a lot about counter-extremism in the U.S., I’ve looked into the UK’s Prevent. As part of my work, I also read articles on counter-extremism in India, France, and elsewhere. Even then, I’m constantly working to increase my understanding of counter-extremism globally. It is the underlying pulse of the World, yes, but that pulse is expressed differently across borders.
NAZAR is a reflection of my own curiosities. As I build out my coverage of global surveillance, I figured why not momentarily hone in on CVE and Prevent. I’ve gathered testimonials from Fatema Ahmad, the executive director of Boston’s Muslim Justice League, and Azfar Shafi, a researcher at CAGE. CVE in the U.S. builds off Prevent. But each program looks very different in its respective countries due to their own particularities.
Let’s get into it.
Fatema Ahmad, Muslim Justice League
[The United States’] CVE started slightly after Prevent and still looks like the earliest version of Prevent. Whereas the UK went on to make Prevent a law, the US has continued using predominantly grants from multiple federal agencies to encourage local government, law enforcement, and nonprofits to participate and cultivate the framework. This was done early on in the UK as well.
Another significant similarity is that both models criminalize mental health and youth. Prevent has resulted in public employees, including healthcare providers and educators, being required to criminalize their patients and youth through this lens. In the US, two major themes of CVE programming are threat assessment teams and other programs that focus on healthcare providers, as well as programs that focus on youth - through youth programming and school programming.
The CVE models all rely on radicalization theory, which came about around 2010 and specifically focused on incidents of Muslims committing violence. That theory was then popularized by the NYPD to justify surveillance of Muslims. Both models depend on a core theory that Muslims are prone to violence, and while the UK model took off faster, the US has been central to this all along as well. That's part of why we know there is no form of CVE that is viable - its foundation relies on an Islamophobic theory. Now, both the US and UK governments are claiming that their efforts will address "all types of violence" in the wake of rising white nationalist and white supremacist violence. As I've written about in this report, expanding this model to achieve equal opportunity surveillance is harmful and will not prevent violence (none of these models have been proven effective).
CVE is very much a global strategy, and that is thanks to the US pushing it through the State Department, international partnerships, and forums - including the UN. You can see some of this history combined, with the US CVE strategy first announced in 2011, followed by a summit, pilot cities, and a request at the UN General Assembly for global CVE efforts via FACT SHEET: The White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism.
CVE is showing up everywhere, from the Philippines to Kenya, and has rather similar impacts on youth, Muslims, activists, etc, in all of these places. While the US claims outrage over China's treatment of Uyghurs, China is using CVE and other War on Terror tactics there - Mobashra Tazamal has written some excellent articles on this. I believe the UK had actually promoted the Prevent model to China as well.
Azfar Shafi, CAGE
While the UK’s Prevent was not the first of this kind of modern ‘counter-extremism’ policy, it was in many ways the most influential. Therefore many CVE policies internationally, including the US', are deeply influenced by it, and operate off of the framework advanced by Prevent. For example, functioning as a ‘soft’ entry point for surveilling communities, putting forward a checklist of ‘subversive’ behaviours to be monitored, and co-opting Muslim community institutions as intelligence assets.
Though the US’ CVE policy has developed in its own way, including through various rebrands in recent years, the fundamentals of Prevent still shine through.
It was under the first Obama administration that the framework of Prevent was adopted by the US government in its Preventing Violent Extremism strategy 2011. This came about at a time when the US government was collaborating on the question of ‘countering radicalisation’ with the EU– which had by then been promoting and mainstreaming Britain’s Prevent for a number of years.
Prevent, and later CVE more broadly, has been actively exported through a number of multilateral forums – through the EU and the UN, as well as through direct government-to-government collaboration. From the very beginning, the UK has been promoting elements of its ‘counter-extremism’ approach internationally, as part of its soft power repertoire.
Over the last decade, private companies – including social media providers, Big Tech companies and think tanks – have become more of a prominent feature of the international CVE scene, and CVE has ballooned into an industry of its own. Institutions such as the EU’s Radicalization Awareness Network and the Global Counterterrorism Forum serve as conduits for public-private partnerships and for this international exchange of security practice.
There is therefore a mutually reinforcing political economy of governments, state agencies, supra-national bodies, private entities and research centres through which policies such as Prevent/CVE are exported and expanded.
There has been a major shift worldwide towards policing the so-called ‘pre-crime’ space since the onset of the War on Terror, and towards enabling intrusive state intervention on the basis of the ideological content of individuals or groups, rather than their actual practices. That is to say that CVE represents a qualitative expansion of policing, not – as it is sometimes imagined – a ‘soft’ alternative to it.
As such, the logic of Prevent/CVE can today be seen internationally - though often articulated within their particular local contexts, or taking on regional flavours.
The French state’s approach to what they term ‘Islamist separatism’ and preserving secularism is a particularly shocking example, in addition to being nakedly Islamophobic.
Under the government of Emmanuel Macron, France has adopted what they term the ‘Systematic Obstruction’ policy - through which almost exclusively Muslim institutions have been targeted, investigated, sanctioned and even dissolved by decree on the slimmest pretenses. Under it we have seen mosques, Islamic schools and regular Muslim establishments targetted, as well as major Muslim, antiracist and pro-Palestine NGOs dissolved.
The crackdown on French civil society represents a deeply troubling shift towards the exercise of centralised, arbitrary and deeply politicised powers – and is being carried out by the government once touted by liberal Europe as its saving grace. It's important we see this, and CVE policies at large, for what they are - not as isolated policing strategies, but as the expression of politics by other means. They represent the efforts of deeply insecure governments, seeking desperately to rein in and maintain their grip on political life at a time when they are facing systemic challenges on multiple fronts.