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This article identifies a fault in the PREVENT strand in the UK"s counter-terrorism strategy, CON... more This article identifies a fault in the PREVENT strand in the UK"s counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST. The fault is that its model of the sort of radicalization that leads to violence presupposes that people are exposed to radical ideas, more or less consciously weigh them up against alternatives, and adopt them along with the lines of action they entail. That is a good strategy as far as it goes: surely some are radicalized this way, and an appropriate way of countering that is to expose them to a critique of radical ideas. But that strategy misses the possibility that there are other routes to the sort of radicalization that leads to a readiness to kill and be killed. People may be carried away into that by what I shall call Theatre in this article, without weighing up what they are doing. So just exposing them to alternative ideas is futile. Missing that is a serious and potentially lethal flaw in PREVENT, and so it needs a rethink of its counter-radicalization strategy.
This article identifies a fault in the PREVENT strand in the UK"s counter-terrorism strategy, CON... more This article identifies a fault in the PREVENT strand in the UK"s counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST. The fault is that its model of the sort of radicalization that leads to violence presupposes that people are exposed to radical ideas, more or less consciously weigh them up against alternatives, and adopt them along with the lines of action they entail. That is a good strategy as far as it goes: surely some are radicalized this way, and an appropriate way of countering that is to expose them to a critique of radical ideas. But that strategy misses the possibility that there are other routes to the sort of radicalization that leads to a readiness to kill and be killed. People may be carried away into that by what I shall call Theatre in this article, without weighing up what they are doing. So just exposing them to alternative ideas is futile. Missing that is a serious and potentially lethal flaw in PREVENT, and so it needs a rethink of its counter-radicalization strategy.