Literature detailing the inadequacies and controversies of the Prevent strategy is extensive. Critical accounts of Prevent have accused it of failing in its purpose to prevent extremism (Skoczylis & Andrews, 2020); argued that it constructs Muslim communities as ‘suspect’ (Hickman et al, 2011) and contended that it neglects the threat posed by the far-Right (Kundnani, 2012). Acknowledging the latter criticism, the 2011 revision of the Prevent strategy discredited the initial exclusive focus on Muslim communities and explicitly committed to addressing ring-wing extremism and radicalisation. Extending the scope of Prevent to address the threat of the far-Right was depicted as strengthening counter-terrorism efforts that will also reduce the “perceived discrimination” of the strategy (HM Government, 2011, p3). But this rhetorical conflation between ring-wing extremism and ‘Islamic’ extremism is inadequate because it maintains a ‘veneer of colour blindness’ (Younis, 2020) that fails to engage in the (post)colonial context in which racialised Muslim populations are construed as suspect in the first place. Therefore, given these inadequacies, what purpose does the Prevent strategy serve?

This essay understands Prevent as not about counter-terrorism, but as part of a larger project of racial (b)ordering that casts racialised populations as a ‘threat’ to white Britain (El-Enany, 2020). Indeed, silencing the racist logics of Prevent reinforces this project, because it obscures and perpetuates the marginalisation of racialised Muslims, and (re)produces the white nation’s sovereignty and power (see: Richter-Montpetit, 2014). Thus, maintaining Prevent’s ‘veneer of colourblindness’ (Younis, 2020) is vital for white Britain, because it restores its (fragile) power and (threatened) racial project.

Yet, processes of racialisation and race are conspicuously absent from critical accounts of Prevent (for example: Boukalas, 2019; Skoczylis and Andrews, 2020; Heath-Kelly, 2017). Therefore, the first contribution of this essay is to demonstrate how constructions of Britishness and the racialisation of Muslims is evident throughout all iterations of Prevent from its initial community cohesion approach to the Prevent Duty introduced through the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act (2015).

This is not to suggest that Prevent does not implicate all sections and communities in society (Boukalas, 2019), because as the 2015 imposition of a statutory duty on public sector institutions to participate in Prevent has shown, the strategy concerns society as a whole. But, e(race)ing (Moore, 2012) the centrality of the racialisation of Muslims in what makes the Prevent strategy possible fails to engage in the racialised (post)colonial history of security practices. Occluding this from discussions of Prevent results in a whitewashing of how security practices operate (Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2019) and assigns racism to a consequence of Prevent, rather than constitutive of it. Thus, the main contribution the essay makes is to show that processes of racialisation and the construction of a white Britain cannot be removed from the logics of Prevent, because it is key to its condition of possibility.

This essay comprises of three sections. The first section examines the initial conceptualisation of Prevent and its subsequent strategy revisions from 2011-2015. The section highlights the conceptual importance of “Britishness” and “British values”, which is significant in light of British colonial history. The second section turns to a Foucauldian reading of Prevent, examining how Muslimified populations are governed by the programme. The section concludes by arguing a Foucauldian reading of Prevent can fail to account for race and coloniality in the construction of security practices. Following from this, the third section looks at the formation of a white Britain through immigration laws and citizenship deprivation, and how racialised populations come to represent threats to the nation. This enables Prevent to be situated within a larger racial project of (b)ordering that depends on the silencing of its racist logics.

Race written into Prevent

Britain’s counter-terrorism (CONTEST) strategy comprises of four policy strands – Pursue, Prevent, Protect and Prepare. The Prevent strand, which will be the subject of this essay, focuses on countering radical ideology cultivated by “violent extremists” and their alleged “apologists” through a ‘hearts and minds’ programme (HM Government, 2011). Prevent has undergone numerous revisions following a change in government in 2010 and differences in policy details. But there is one constant: race is written into Prevent, even if it is in palatable race-neutral terms. Reading through the different iterations of Prevent from 2003 to 2015 allows us to see how fundamentally racialised Prevent is.

First Development

Released in response to the “emerging terrorist threat” following the 9/11 attacks, CONTEST was initially developed in 2003, although, admittedly, an underdeveloped and “slender document” (Home Affairs Committee, 2009, p5). The crisis of the 7/7 bombings in 2005, however, prompted the government to reconsider the document to prevent a domestic terror threat. Prevent promised to contain this risk through a community cohesion approach, that unapologetically focused on a homogenised Muslim community (Thomas, 2015).

Although the community cohesion approach was said to be promoting integration and shared values, this meant explicitly defining Muslim communities outside of ‘Britishness’ in the first place. Indeed, this is seen in then-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s (2005) speech concerning the 7/7 bombings where there is an important separation between “us”, who “want to save and improve human life”, and “them”, who “are intent on destroying human life”. The discursive distinction between us and them, despite three of the four perpetrators of the bombings being British-born, serves to distance Britain and Britishness away from the causes of the attack, and place it firmly in the hands of the ‘Other’ Muslims.

The exclusive focus on Muslim communities in the strategy produced a number of, predictable, but disastrous consequences. For instance, Thomas (2015) highlights that the financial investment in Muslim communities, as a result of the Prevent funding scheme that was done in direct proportion to the number of Muslims in a local authority area (Qurashi, 2018, p4), created resentment amongst non-Muslim communities. Non-Muslim communities perceived Muslim communities as benefiting from ‘opportunities’ provided by Prevent funding that was being denied to them. Here, the mutually reinforcing relationship between the community cohesion approach and the ‘Othering’ of Muslimified communities is apparent. The community cohesion can thus be seen as (re)affirming the ‘separateness’ of Muslimified communities from white Britishness that had been expressed in riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in 2001 (Thomas, 2015).

2011 Revision

Responding to the criticism of the previous community cohesion strategy, the Coalition government released the 2011 Prevent review, which sought to address all forms of “extremist ideology” (HM Government, 2011, p1). This commitment to address the threat of the far-right, however, has been described as “fundamentally hollow” because it is characterised by pre-existing hierarchal beliefs around ‘Islamic’ extremism (Bentley, 2015, p120). Indeed, the strategy’s commitment to attend to the threat posed by the far-right is undermined by the reviews’ persistent claim that the greatest threat to Britain is from ‘Islamic’ extremism (HM Government, 2011).

To combat against this threat, Prime Minister David Cameron outlined the new strategy of Prevent that emphasised a “muscular” promotion of a value-based approach. The value-based approach established ‘Fundamental British Values’ (FBVs), which were presented as: ‘democracy’, ‘the rule of law’, ‘individual liberty’ and ‘the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs’ (HM Government, 2011). Given that Britain is founded on colonialism, enslavement and racism, these values being advanced as fundamentally British is questionable (El-Enany, 2020). Nonetheless, as discussed by Crawford (2017), these values are racially coded and refer to (white) British cultural norms only, as evidenced by Cameron’s (2014) assertion that FBV’s are as “British as the Union flag, as football, as fish and chips”. This discourse enforces a notion of ‘Britishness’ that is distinctively white and liberal, whilst designating non-white British norms, lifestyles and identities as non-liberal and belonging outside of Britishness. To be considered as belonging to the nation, racialised populations must constantly ‘perform loyalty’ by confirming their commitment and investing in this flimsy conceptualisation of ‘Britishness’ (Bhattacharyya et al. 2021, p49). 

2013 Killing of Lee Rigby

The demarcation between Muslimified populations and spaces became further entrenched in the Prevent strategy following the killing of soldier Lee Rigby in 2013, which provoked the Coalition government to re-assess the programme (Thomas, 2015). Announcing the assembly of a task force on extremism and radicalisation, David Cameron (2013) asserted that the aim was to “drain the swamp which [extremists] inhabit … that means looking at the process of radicalisation on our campuses, it means looking at Islamic centres that have been taken over by extremists and gone wrong, it means looking at those mosques, which are struggling to throw out the extremists and to help them in the work they are doing”. Thus, Prevent is not contained in the present space, but spills into the future by seeking to defeat the threat by working in the pre-criminal space.

Although Cameron explicitly names ‘Islamic centres’ as the milieu in which radical ideas are accepted and where the ‘conveyor belt’ to radicalisation cultivates, the question of who is considered to live in these ‘swamps’ can be additionally answered by looking at the case of Andres Breivik in Norway. Rather than engaging in an analysis of the context in which the Islamophobia and white supremacy politics expressed by Breivik is espoused by everyday by Norwegians and other Europeans, the trial and media coverage focused almost exclusively on his (in)sanity; refusing to compel an analysis of his racist politics beyond an individualised and psychologised frame (Patel, 2014). In contrast, the racialised and psychologised Muslimified ‘terrorist’ stands in for the ideology of Islam as a whole, who needs to be drained from Western nation-states (ibid). Thus, the white terrorist is never said to live in a swamp, but an isolated habitat, unlisted for drainage. Furthermore, the swamp is devoid of any social, historical and political context, and comprising of the racialised Other who threatens the white social order.

2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act

Following the assembly of the task force, arguably the most significant development of Prevent came in the form of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act (HM Government, 2015). The Act imposed a statutory duty for authorities, such as healthcare and education institutions, to participate in Prevent and prevent people from being drawn into terrorism. In educational settings, this also involves actively promoting FBVs, by “challenging opinions or behaviours in schools that are contrary to [FBVs]” (Department of Education 2014).

Although this approach registers everyone who comes into contact with public sector institutions as a threat, Younis and Jadhav (2019) show that Prevent continues to be racially marked. Their research showed that Muslim NHS staff were deeply fearful of expressing any criticism of Prevent, because they felt already looked ‘through a lens of suspicion’ and feared they would be branded as ‘terrorist sympathisers’ (ibid, p412). Similarly, the securitisation and criminalisation of Muslim students in education settings has discouraged them from discussing, exploring, and researching Islam in case of Prevent referrals (Guest et al. 2020). This fear is not unfounded, as Muslim students have been interrogated and referred to Prevent for reading a textbook relating to terrorism for their studies (Ramesh and Halliday, 2015) and wearing Pro-Palestine badges and wristbands (The Independent, 2016), amongst other reasons. Furthermore, claims of the strategy’s neutrality and non-discrimination can be dismissed easily by looking at the statistics of Prevent’s referrals, where in 2017-18, Muslims were two and a half times more likely to be reported than far-right activists (Guest et al. 2020, p41). This is pertinent because, according to the 2011 census, Muslims comprise only 4.8% of the population of England and Wales (Qurashi, 2018).

This brief history of Prevent outlines its reactionary beginnings and subsequent refinement to become a highly prioritised counter-terrorism strategy. As shown, Prevent is not a neutral, objective protector, but a law that the liberal nation state utilises as a weapon against Muslimified populations (see Ahmad, 2004). Furthermore, claims of Prevent’s race neutrality can be clearly rejected by tracing how it has operated and specifically targeted this population. The following section explores a Foucauldian reading of Prevent that looks at how Muslimified populations have been governed by Prevent.

Governing through Prevent

As the previous section has shown, terrorism is not an event, but a presence permeating the everyday (Cuomo, 1996). Prevent was introduced, and subsequently expanded, to regulate contingency and secure life against this omnipresent threat existing within the social body. The racialised threat within the social body is imagined to be preventable through pre-emptive policing and surveillance. Thus, Prevent can be seen as an attempt to “establish a sort of homeostasis […] by achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers” (Foucault, 2003, p249).

This section proceeds with a Foucauldian reading of Prevent, discussing how Prevent operates through subjects, including Muslimified populations, to create a state of governance. Because, as Foucault argues, power is exercised through subjects, not over them (Foucault, 1982). Following the work of Howell and Richter-Montpetit (2019), the section concludes with a discussion of the limitations of a Foucauldian reading of Prevent, because it treats racism as a result of Prevent, rather than constitutive of it.

Surveying Muslimified Populations

As conveyed within the previous section, Muslimified subjects are the target of Prevent’s counter-terrorism efforts, despite claims from the government that it targets all threats of terrorism and extremism. As such, Prevent has been understood as ‘embedding infrastructures of surveillance in Muslimified communities’ to predict and pre-empt radicalisation and extremism (Qurashi, 2018). Indeed, intelligence gathering is at the heart of Prevent practice, as confirmed by then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd in a statement following the Manchester bombings: “we get intelligence much more from the Prevent strategy, which engages with local community groups, not through the police” (The Guardian, 2017). Surveying and gathering information are the very forms of liberal governmentality, seeking to manage and govern populations at a distance (Ceyhan, 2012). Thus, Prevent can be positioned as a liberal project, under the guise of counter-terrorism, that aims to contain and govern Muslimified populations through pre-emptive policing and criminalisation.

Exercised through Muslimified Populations

Foucault’s conceptualisation of biopolitics requires an analysis of the relationship between Muslim communities and the state beyond one that is purely negative, because: “what makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse” (Foucault, 1980, p118-119). For instance, Ali (2015) argues the creation of the ‘Muslim community’ so often referred to in counter-terrorism discourse was reliant on an asymmetrical relationship between state and Muslim subjects. Engaging with prominent Muslim figures and groups, such as the Muslim Council of Britain (MBC), enabled the government to map and govern the created ‘Muslim community’ from a distance for counter-terrorism purposes. Extracting information about Muslim communities through these organisations additionally fostered the ‘conduct of conduct’ of Muslims; producing a binary between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ Muslim.

The ‘good’ Muslim subject, such as the mother, is invited to exercise the agenda of Prevent. The Prevent Tragedies campaign, operating from 2015-2017, invited Muslimified women to ‘fight against extremism and terrorism’ by reporting their children to Prevent (Andrews, 2020). The narrative of the campaign constructs a particular femininity, the nurturing but naïve mother, who is defined in relation to others, to promote the message of counter-terrorism (ibid). This caricature of the Muslimified woman who is marked by their passivity, naivety and emotions is not a new phenomenon in counter-terrorism discourse. As Khalili (2011) shows, women are essentialised as less corrupt and less war-like and are therefore an important terrain upon whom counterinsurgency experiments and messages can be performed.  Indeed, the Muslimified woman exists alongside the figure of the Muslimified man, who is constituted as a threat to the nation, as well as a threat to the Muslimified woman (ibid).

The invitation of the Muslimified woman to protect the nation against the imminent threat of terrorism can also be seen in the controversial appointment of Sara Khan as the lead for the Commission for Countering Extremism. Opposition to Khan’s appointment was concerned with her previous partnership with the Home Office and her “strong advocat[ion]” of Prevent, thus leading to a perception of her as “a creation of and mouthpiece for the Home Office” and maintaining the state’s disciplinary apparatus (Grierson, 2018). Yet, to be unwelcoming of the appointment was to be un-feminist, because the leadership of a young Muslim woman should be ‘celebrated’, because there “aren’t enough women in leadership” (ibid). This mobilisation of ‘women’s rights’ to incorporate Muslimified women into the disciplinary apparatus of the state represents what Farris (2017) terms the ‘neoliberal institutionalisation of femonationalism’. By this, Farris highlights that certain subjects, in this case Muslimified women, are invited into the nation to advance anti-Islam agendas and policies, such as Prevent, in the name of advancing women’s rights. Emphasising this aspect of neoliberal governance is important because it stresses that not all subjects are governed the same. 

Instruments of the State

As the previous section discussed, the Counter-Terrorism Security Act (2015) imposed a statutory duty onto public section institutions and professionals to participate in Prevent, making them ‘instruments of the state’ (Crawford, 2017). Teachers, for example, become essential in promoting the ideological apparatus of the state, shaping subjects and regulating dissent by identifying and reporting those who oppose or differ ideologies that threaten the neoliberal consensus (Skoczylis & Andrews, 2020). Critics of the statutory duty, such as the National Union of Teachers and the Royal College of Psychiatrists, have expressed concern about Prevent’s intrusion into the private sphere, arguing that it is profoundly illiberal (Heath-Kelly, 2016). But, as outlined by Skoczylis and Andrews (2020, p358), Prevent is “profoundly neoliberal in that it promotes the neoliberal status quo and neoliberal ideology, and that it is designed to manage the negative effects of neoliberal policies on society”. Thus, Prevent can be understood as a thread within the neoliberal ideological quilt, shaping and governing subjects. Importantly absent from Skoczylis and Andrew’s analysis, however, is an engagement with race and how Muslimified populations are understood as ‘risky’ in the neoliberal order, exemplifying what Bhambra (2017a) calls ‘methodological whiteness’. This is to say that Skocyzlis and Andrew’s analysis:

fails to acknowledge the role played by race in the very structuring of that world, and of the ways in which knowledge is constructed and legitimated within it. It fails to recognise the dominance of ‘whiteness’ as anything other than the standard state of affairs and treats a limited perspective – that deriving from white experience – as a universal perspective (Bhambra, 2017b).  

Only by acknowledging the role of race in producing the conditions that make technologies such as Prevent possible can the breadth of its operations be understood.

Limitations

The erasure (Moore, 2012) of the centrality of the racialisation of Muslims in the operation of Prevent can be identified in literature placing Prevent within a Foucauldian framework. For example, Heath-Kelly (2017) highlights the articulation of Prevent as safeguarding within the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act (2015) emphasises its biopolitical heritage as a structure productive and governing of population. She argues that within the imagined pre-criminal space, “each life is interpreted as uniquely dangerous” and thus warrant surveillance, although this fails to engage with how, specifically, Muslimified populations are targeted by Prevent (Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2019). Additionally, profoundly untheorised in Heath-Kelly’s (2017) article, and much of the literature on Prevent, is the constitutive role of racial politics in the genealogy of security practices and biopower (ibid). Indeed, there is a disciplinary tendency of Foucauldian Security Studies (FSS) to whitewash the raciality and coloniality of modern power and violence (ibid). Only through engaging with Britain as a white, imperial nation (El-Enany, 2020) can scholars capture the significance of Prevent, and understand that racism is constitutive of Prevent, rather than a consequence. Therefore, the next section situates the racialisation of Muslims within a white Britain, that has been constructed through immigration laws and citizenship deprivation. The section explores constructed racialised figures who have represented threats to white Britain. This conceptualisation enables Prevent to be positioned within a wider racial project of (b)ordering that places racialised populations outside of Britishness and a threat to the white nation.  This highlights that racism is key to Prevent’s condition of possibility.

White Britain threated by the racialised Other

Constructing a White Britain

The constitution of a white Britain can be identified in the production of a British subjecthood through immigration law and controls. This is not to suggest that before these laws that a white Britain did not exist, nor that the nation was welcoming to racialised populations, but rather this to highlight the role of law in producing the present where racialised populations are defined as outside of Britishness.

The production of citizenship for the United Kingdom and its colonies through the British Nationality Act (1948) can be positioned within the genealogy of the production of a white Britain. Although the fact that the nationality net was cast wide can be seen as a welcoming of racialised colony and Commonwealth citizens into the nation, the idea they would travel to and live in Britain was an unintended consequence of the Act, which the government sought to quell in subsequent laws (El-Enany, 2020, p14). The passing of the Immigration Act (1971) promised to control the migration of racialised subjects by imposing the right of abode and therefore right of entry and stay into Britain to only patrials, those born in Britain or with a parent born in Britain. This law made Britishness commensurate to whiteness, because in 1971, a person born in Britain or with a parent born in Britain was most likely (98%) to be white (ibid, p4). The British Nationality Act (1981) furthered this racial exclusion by defining citizenship only in national terms, tying citizenship to the right of entry and abode. Racialised colony and Commonwealth citizens thus had no entitlement to Britishness as an identity nor to access Britain as a place (El-Enany, 2020, p130). Furthermore, through these laws, white Britain became geographically distinct from the remains of its racialised colonies and Commonwealth, giving only the white British subject the right to access its colonial wealth (ibid). Exclusionary and expulsive immigration laws, therefore, have produced a British identity centred on whiteness, and consequently categorised racialised people outside of Britishness.

The (re)construction of a white Britain can additionally be seen in examples of citizenship deprivation, as seen in the case of Shamima Begum in 2019. Before proceeding, I would like to highlight that it is not my intention to create a fallacious binary between that of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ citizenship deprival, because the policy itself is racialised (El-Enany, 2020). But Begum’s case, in particular, is pertinent because she is illegally stateless as result of her citizenship deprivation, and there was no discernible evidence she constitutes a threat to national security (Chahal, 2019). As there are no recorded examples of white far-right extremists being deprived of their citizenship in the name of national security, Begum’s citizenship deprivation can be seen as rhetorical (Parsons, 2014). Begum’s case conveys the conditionality of British citizenship for racialised populations, whilst affirming that Britishness is only inherent to white British populations.

Constructing Racialised Muslim Difference

The conditionality of belonging to the white nation is identifiable in the production of racialised ‘folk devils’, such as that of the ‘migrant’. The spectacle of the racialised migrant who steals jobs, ‘scrounges’ on welfare benefits, lies about their age and refugee status induces panic because it tells white Britons their country is not their own (Bhattacharyya et al. 2021). Indeed, in a time of neoliberal restructuring, the decline of the welfare state and the erosion of the ‘wages of whiteness’, the construction of the racialised migrant is central to reconstitution of racial hegemony in a time of crisis (Danewid, 2021). Overcoming the crisis means policing those who are framed to have created and exacerbated it: namely, the racialised migrant. Thus, the expansion of borders or the deprivation of citizenship serves to ease white anxieties about the racialised Other who threatens the white British nation.

Conceptualising the racialised figure of the Muslim means looking beyond the biological essentialism of racism and focusing instead on processes of racialisation that render populations as racial subjects. Certain phenotypes, cultural and religious attributes that are coded as not British combine to produce the construct of what Ahmad (2004) refers to as the ‘Muslim-looking person’. Rooted in the same logic as Ahmad, this essay has employed the concept of ‘Muslimified populations’ to refer to the racialised construct. 

The figure of the Muslim has taken many different representations within Britain which is beyond the breadth of this essay. Instead, I will focus on two specific figures within current public discourse, that of the ‘dangerous brown man’ who sexually abuses white women, and the ‘breeder’ who drains on economic resources in times of austerity.

The spectre of the Muslimified ‘grooming gangs’ who ‘ran’ towns such as Rochdale and Rotherham permeated the British public’s imagination throughout the past decade. The framing of the ‘dangerous brown men’ as having a particular disdain for white women because they were white not only breathed new life into colonial tropes surround the sexual excess of Muslimified men but also reinforced far-right arguments about the nation (Bhattacharyya et al. 2021). The vulnerability of the young white women came to represent that of the weak British nation, who had been besieged by multiculturalism and ‘political correctness’ (ibid, p117-118). This was further consolidated through the citizenship deprivation of three men who were convicted alongside six others in Rochdale, as their contempt for white women and Britain constituted a security threat (BBC, 2018).

In their article exploring Islamophobia experienced by British Muslims, Ali and Whitham (2021) highlight the gendered dimensions experienced by Muslim women. The targeting of Muslim mothers as ‘having a load of kids … just to kill the benefits system and housing” draws upon colonial tropes around ‘breeding’ and competition for survival in a society with limited resources (ibid, p206). The conditionality and punitiveness in the benefits system are consequently framed as protecting the nation from the ‘breeder’ and ‘scrounger’ who drains the scarce economic resources in times of austerity (Bhattacharyya et al. 2021).

These figures do not exist as a distinctive phenomenon. Rather, the construct of the racialised migrant, the ‘dangerous brown man’, the ‘breeder’ and the Muslimified terrorist both implicate and refer to one another. The production of these racialised figures who threaten white Britain creates moral panic that justifies the policing of racialised Others, whether that be through the violence of the expansion of borders, the conditionality of the welfare state, or the everyday surveillance of Muslimified populations through Prevent.

What is at stake if white Britain was not able to perform these acts of violence against racialised populations? As Richter-Montpetit’s (2014, p55) article outlines, these acts of violence are vital to white Britain because not only does this constitute a display of its authority, but it is where the nation produces sovereignty and subjection. Furthermore, silencing the racist logics underpinning these forms of state violence is important because it legitimises their existence. In other words, white Britain relies on a ‘veneer of colourblindness’ (Younis, 2020) because if its racist logics were to be perceived, its authority and sovereignty is threatened. The limitations of white Britain’s power are apparent here, because it is “on account of the vulnerability, permeability, contestability and hence precarity of power” that these violences are used in the first place (ibid, p57). In conclusion, the idea Prevent is race-neutral, or that racism is a consequence of Prevent is difficult to sustain against the backdrop of a white Britain that casts racialised populations as a threat. Further, unseeing the racist logics constituting Prevent legitimises the existence of the programme, and (re)produces the white Britain propagating it.

Conclusion

Adding to scholarship critical of the Prevent strand of the CONTEST strategy, this essay has explored the racialisation of Muslimified populations inherent to the programme. Arguing that this has been obscured and unseen by state actors and non-state actors, as well as by some of Prevent’s critics. This essay suggests that only through acknowledging the logics underpinning Prevent can the programme be appropriately interrogated.

This essay further argues that the racialised figure of the Muslimified terrorist propagated by Prevent exists alongside that of other racialised Others, namely the racialised migrant, the ‘dangerous brown man’, and the ‘breeder’, who all constitute threats to white Britain. These figures exist to legitimise punitive and violent practices by the state, such as the expansion of borders, the conditionality of the welfare state and the surveillance of Muslimified populations via Prevent. These practices are vital to the sustainment of white Britain, because these practices are sites in which the white nation restores its fragile and threated power. Unseeing the racist logics fundamental to these violent practices (re)produces the white Britain instigating them, because it legitimises their existence. Thus, maintaining Prevent’s ‘veneer of colourblindness’ (Younis, 2020) is not only vital for its operations, but also for white Britain to continue its racial project of (b)ordering.

At the current juncture where Britain defines itself as a ‘beacon to the rest of Europe and the world’ and ‘not institutionally racist’ (Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, 2021, p8) this essay provides a timely analysis on how processes of racialisation are central to how white Britain defines itself and restores its authority. Destabilising the power of white Britain means recognising and interrogating the racist logics at its very core. This requires connecting and resisting exclusionary and expulsive practices of Preventwithin a larger project of racial (b)ordering in white Britain. 

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Further Reading on E-International Relations

• Integrating under Threat: A Balance-of-threat Account of European Integration
• Racial Security: The Unobserved Threat in IR
• The Generational Diversity of Religious Orientations of Muslims in Britain
• How Important is Neutrality in Providing Humanitarian Assistance?
• Examining the Validity of a ‘Global Britain’ and Its Ties with the Commonwealth
• A Review of Critical Race Theory’s Critiques of Mainstream IR