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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]

As the United Kingdom has placed some of its Prevent strategy on a statutory footing and is proposing to introduce a Counter-Extremism Bill, this article argues that a legal definition of extremism must be carefully drafted to provide legal certainty. The main recommendation is that all forms of violent and nonviolent extremism comes under the definition, ensuring it is differentiated from activism. Activism may hold radical views counter to the mainstream opinion, but it is required in liberal democracies as it encourages healthy debate and can prevent the policing of thought in any government strategy or legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mounting tide of foreign fighters leaving Britain for the Middle East to fight, sacrifice or find new lives has blighted European governments and led to the further tightening up of counter-terrorism measures. Since the first British arrest of a Syrian returnee (Choudhury) in 2014, the latest figures of foreign fighter returnees have surged to approximately 800. A number of strategies aimed at thwarting these trends have surfaced including a call upon Muslim parents to scrutinise their children’s attitudes and behaviour and to be watchful of their radicalization. Based on a study in the West Midlands (in the UK), the paper provides a snapshot of how Muslim parents have received calls upon them to report their actual or potentially radicalized children to the police. We argue that current practices are likely to be ineffective unless more democratic spaces are provided for free political expression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

The London bombings of 7 July 2005 were a major event shaping the relationship between Muslims and non- Muslims in Britain. In this paper we introduce the idea of 'securitized citizens' to analyse the changing relationship between British Muslims and wider British society in response to this and similar events. Through an analysis of qualitative interviews with Muslims and non- Muslims of a variety of ethnic backgrounds in the areas where the London bombers lived in West Yorkshire we examine the popular perceptions of non- Muslims and Muslims' experiences. We show how processes of securitization and racialization have interacted with Islamophobic discourses and identifications, as well as the experiences of Muslims in West Yorkshire after the attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the implementation of the UK's ' Prevent Strategy' for countering terrorist risks and threats. Informed by qualitative data, it critically assesses the perception and reception 'on the ground' of Prevent Strategy policies amongst those individuals who are, in many ways, the focus of such interventions. It is found that there are a number of grievances held, though three are of particular concern and revolve around funding issues, confusion of the overarching aims of the strategy, and suspicions of intelligence gathering and spying within Muslim communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The paper explores some of the reasons behind the rise in Islamic radicalism in the United Kingdom. The author seeks to suggest some ideas as to how the government and British society best deal with this worrying trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]