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Research on UK government counter‐terrorism measures has claimed that Muslims are treated as a 'suspect community'. However, there is limited research exploring the divisive effects that membership of a 'suspect community' has on relations within Muslim communities. Drawing from interviews with British Muslims living in Leeds or Bradford, I address this gap by explicating how co‐option of Muslim community members to counter extremism fractures relations within Muslim communities. I reveal how community members internalize fears of state targeting which precipitates internal disciplinary measures. I contribute the category of 'internal suspect body' which is materialized through two intersecting conditions within preventative counter‐terrorism: the suspected extremist for Muslims to look out for and suspected informer who might report fellow Muslims. I argue that the suspect community operates through a network of relations by which terrors of counter‐terrorism are reproduced within Muslim communities with divisive effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Counter-extremism approaches in America and Britain have come under criticism and scrutiny due to the recurrence of terrorist incidents and the perception that they are alienating Muslim communities. This essay analyzes the course of counter-extremism policy development on both sides of the Atlantic and proposes potential solutions to some of the most entrenched difficulties that policymakers have encountered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the reporting of the “Operation Trojan Horse” affair in two British newspapers, the Daily Mail and The Guardian, in 2014. I argue that this high-profile case was a vehicle for the Conservative-led Government, and parts of the United Kingdom’s press, to advance their doctrine of muscular liberalism, an ideology that locates the rise of extremism in the policies of multiculturalism. In this interpretation of the event, it was argued that, under a Labour council, schools in Birmingham had been given the freedom to practise a segregationist agenda, resulting in an infiltration of Islamist ideology. Through a radicalisation narrative, that locates the causes of terrorism with extremist thought, an issue of local governance and agency was transformed into an argument about terrorist radicalisation. This allowed Government agencies to intervene, at a local and national level, promoting an assimilationist agenda through conceptualisations of national identity, here constructed as “British values”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, the city of Birmingham (UK) became embroiled in a high-profile scandal that would bring it and the wider education system under disrepute. The ‘Trojan Horse’ affair, as it become known, began with an anonymised letter that claimed hard-line ‘Islamists’ were plotting and planning to take over a number of schools in Birmingham. Amongst the allegations were that some of the schools had been promoting gender segregation and that children were not safeguarded against the risks of extremism. This article examines some of those issues in relation to the Trojan Horse scandal and uses a qualitative study focused on participants from the area of Birmingham. As the tribunal hearings against the teachers have now found no wrongdoing, the findings reported in this article suggest that Muslim communities feel unfairly categorised as extremists and that such issues have impacted upon their sense of identity and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Prevent policy was introduced in 2003 as part of the UK counter-terrorism strategy (CONTEST) with the aim of preventing the radicalisation of people to terrorism. In 2015, it was given a statutory footing in the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act and it became a legal duty for Higher Education Institutions among others. Since then, Higher Education Institutions have been working to ensure their compliance with the legal duty. This article reflects on the implementation of the Prevent duty in one university. It is informed by an engagement with the Prevent group in the university which was created to implement the Prevent duty. The article argues that academic expertise had little impact in shaping the implementation of the Prevent duty at the university because the epistemic stance of counter-terrorism side lines expertise and evidence so that it can maintain its coherence and integrity. Specifically, the impact of academic expertise was limited because critically oriented academic expertise complicates a straightforward implementation of the legal duty, a state-centric orientation in the Prevent group constrained the horizon of discussion, and a crisis of knowledge at the heart of counter-terrorism replaces expertise and evidence with ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 7/7 bombings of July 2005, Britain has experienced a domestic terror threat posed by a small minority of young Muslims. In response, Britain has initiated ‘Prevent’, a preventative counter-terrorism programme. Building on previous, general critiques of Prevent, this article outlines and critically discusses the ways in which Prevent has approached young Muslims and their educational institutions. The article argues that, rather than trust in broader and non-stigmatizing processes of anti-extremist education, the police-led Prevent has ‘engaged’ with and surveilled young Muslims. Within Prevent there is little evidence of educational processes that explicitly build youth resilience against extremism. Instead, Muslim youth are viewed as both a risk to society and at risk of catching the terrorist disease, with the contested model of ‘radicalisation’ and child protection concepts utilized to portray risks of exploitation by Islamist extremists that necessitate a deepening process of education-based surveillance. The article identifies non-stigmatizing alternatives to the approach of Prevent, approaches of anti-extremism education that learn from previously problematic anti-racist educational efforts with white young people. This enables the article to advocate for enhanced human rights-based approaches of citizenship education (admittedly, in themselves contested) withallyoung people as the most effective way of building individual and collective youth resilience against terrorist ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will provide a critique of the PVE initiative and its implementation within the context of primary education following the events of 9/11, the 2001 riots and 7/7. Drawing upon empirical data I will argue that the monitoring of young Muslims and ‘extremism’ is problematic and reinforces the logics of Islamophobia through practices of governmentality. Moreover I will examine how whilst the monitoring of extremism is prioritized in many schools, training for teachers on race equality, tolerance and accepting difference is weak if not absent. This, I suggest, demonstrates a clear manifestation of contemporary hegemonic post-racial politics which increasingly silences the critique of institutional racism. Additionally this article will explore how Muslims in the sphere of education have been implicated and problematised against the backdrop of a ‘muscular liberalism’ intent on the return of assimilationist discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on Razzaque's seminal book, From Human Being to Human Bomb which identifies patterns of extremist thought processes amongst young British Muslims, this study is the very first attempt at empirically testing such a concept and establishes a precedent for the study of the links between psychology and Islamism that continue to be critically underdeveloped. By analysing responses from two small samples, a test group of British Muslim UCL students and a control group of British non-Muslim UCL students, this project attempts to pioneer the use of alternative methods in the fight against extremism and ambitions to serve as a small but noteworthy part of an improved holistic national and international policy in the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to examine the new Prevent Strategy 2011 in the United Kingdom and critically analyze its impact upon British Muslim communities. The U.K. government's controversial Prevent Strategy 2011 has come under fierce opposition, with critics arguing that it will not actually prevent extremism but risks labeling the Muslim community as a 'suspect' community. Following the British government review of counterterrorism policies and strategies in 2010, the article examines the key question: Will the new Prevent policy actually work? Recent studies show that previous Prevent policies have risked alienating the Muslim community ( Kundnani). Indeed, the new Prevent Strategy 2011 also has the risk of the depoliticization of Muslim communities from wider civic society and risks creating a mosaic for extremist ideologies. The article argues that, in practice, Prevent is not particularly efficacious, and that the new strategy risks further marginalizing and stigmatizing Muslim communities. Related Articles [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the proposal that corpus linguistics approaches can improve the objectivity of critical discourse analysis research, resulting in a more robust and valid set of findings. Taking a recent project which examined the representation of Islam and Muslims in the British press, corpus-driven procedures identified that Muslims tended to be linked to the concept of extreme belief much more than moderate or strong belief. There were differences across newspapers, with 1 in 8 Muslims describing it as extreme in The People while this figure was 1 in 35 for The Guardian. Such patterns of quantification, however, still require researchers to carry out their own critical interpretations with regard to what counts as acceptable frequencies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, fear of ‘the other’ has focused particularly on ‘home grown’ second-generation Muslims. In the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bombings in London, there was particular horror and incredulity expressed about the fact that many of the bombers had been born and raised in Britain, and universities have been increasingly regarded by various analysts and politicians as potential ‘hotbeds of extremism.’ Yet apart from sensationalistic images of British Muslims as threatening radicals, we still have relatively little in-depth information about the vast majority of ordinary British Muslim young people in higher education. This article explores young British Muslim students' views and experiences of Islamic Student Associations (ISOCs) at three universities in the southeast. What motivates Muslim students to join ISOCs and can we determine clear differences between those who join ISOCs and those who do not? While there is growing evidence that younger British Muslims are more politicized than their parents, and are more likely to mobilize around their identity as Muslims, most British Muslim students' involvement in ISOCs does not pose a threat to British society or to their ability to negotiate their British and Muslim sense of selves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article suggests that Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE), the government's ‘hearts and minds’ response to the threat of domestic Islamist terrorism within the wider CONTEST strategy, has been exposed as both failed and friendless by growing political and academic scrutiny. PVE's monocultural focus on Muslims is in stark contradiction to the overriding policy goal of community cohesion, while its implementation has provoked accusations both of surveillance and of engineering ‘value changes’ within Muslim communities. Local conflicts relating to the operationalisation of PVE result from political disagreement over the balance between community engagement and policing within the Labour government, and these problems leave the future of this key anti-terrorism policy area unclear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]