How Appropriate and Effective is the Prevent Strategy as a Means of Countering Radicalisation? A Focus on British Universities (original) (raw)
This article examines the impact that the Prevent strategy has had on British universities. Guided by a review of the literature on Prevent, data was collected from semi-constructed interviews of several academics who teach counter-terrorism in British universities, one individual who overseas IT usage at a university, and one individual responsible for implementing Prevent at a university. This is used to build an understanding on the impact Prevent has had on academic freedom and expression, and how appropriate this strategy is in countering radicalisation amongst student populations. This paper utilises elements of Grounded Theory to build theories based from these interviews in order to answer this paper’s titular question. Grounded Theory was chosen as the principle methodology for this research for two reasons: First it was established that due to relevant legislation only coming into effect within the last year, there was little pre-existing theories, therefore this paper conducted ‘theory-building’ research; and because interviews were conducted with academic ‘experts’ in counter-terrorism – experts that interwove their empirical observations with academic theory unprompted – which made the emergence of theory from the data, automatic and logical. It was discovered from this that in some ways it is too early to tell on the full impact of prevent. However, the policy has proven ineffective at understanding the complexity of radicalisation, and whilst it has done little to limit academic freedom in general, it has alienated Muslim and minority ethnic students and staff. This can only be detrimental to counter-radicalisation strategies.
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