Comment by Justin Gest:
A bad trade-off
Sacrificing the sense Muslims have of themselves as Britons for supposedly greater security will not help prevent extremism.
The government's new
Contest 2 strategy for preventing violent extremism will do a little to further secure citizens from a terrorist attack, and a lot to alienate the community of British Muslims.
Lacking a consensus about strategies for preventing violent extremism, the government is in the midst of a deadlocked, internal tug-of-war. One the one hand, there is the priority of securing citizens from future terrorist attacks. On the other hand, there is the priority to fulfil this objective without alienating millions of Muslims in the process.
The decided policy –
as published yesterday (pdf) – does neither.
The new Contest strategy is sober, informed, and it admirably attempts to foster a sense of collective responsibility. However, it defines the collective according to crude criteria of "shared values" that rhetorically single out and symbolically indict a large subgroup within Britain – its two million Muslims. This is a mistake for three reasons.
First, one of the precursors to violent and ideological extremism among the Muslim community is a sense of marginalisation from British society and government.
My research examining young Muslims has demonstrated that those who find their Muslim identity irreconcilable with wider British society, those who do not perceive the capacity of British democracy to change, and those who do not believe British government is ultimately interested in their wellbeing are more likely to join an extremist group or withdraw from the public sphere.
A policy that effectively distinguishes Muslims from the British "collective" reinforces the sense that the government is uninterested in the welfare of Muslims – who appear entrenched as shadowy social pariahs. In my fieldwork, young Muslims tend to feel extraordinarily British and wish to be acknowledged as such. Mostly born here, they love football, hip-hop, and chicken and chips. They tend to come from close families, participate in community activities, and aspire to be more prosperous and educated than the previous generation. Like most Britons, this is generally a community of progress.
However, rhetoric of "shared values" is being used to challenge non-Muslim Britons to identify
differences, rather than challenge people to find the wider commonality that we all need Muslims to see too.
Second, in the interest of preventing violent extremism, Muslims are actually the primary group that needs to feel a sense of collective responsibility.
Thanks to
sensationalised popular discourse about Muslim extremism, Muslim perceptions about the ubiquity of religious discrimination, and fervent
disapproval of British foreign policy, the British government is left with little, if any, credibility among its Muslim citizens.
While this new strategy will train 60,000 shopkeepers, it will likely inspire very few Muslims to engage the communities with which they are the most closely acquainted and challenge suspicious activity. Already, the government has encountered resistance from some Muslim youth workers and activists reluctant to cooperate in what they perceive to be a witch-hunt.
This will only make the government's job more difficult.
Third, the very basis of the Contest strategy exploits weaknesses in the British democracy – the very system that actually possesses the capacity to be inclusive by promoting self-expression and effective dissent using non-violent means.
It is only natural that the Home Office considers the worst-case scenario and overreacts to a low-probability threat. (The threat level has been listed at "severe" for months now.)
The problem emerges when in responding to the limited threat of terrorism, the government drafts policies that affect a selected community of people and place correspondingly selective restrictions on their personal liberty. Such steps cannot be justified by reality, and exploit a flaw in democratic governance.
Selective profiling, scrutiny and policy means that most of the citizenry will not be affected, so the usual checks on political injustice and overstretching of power are not catalysed.
In the extreme, this happened when the United States interned its Japanese-American population in concentration camps out of fear that they might collude with their imperial adversaries during the second world war. This remains a
dark chapter in US history.
Not so subtly, with the coincidental publication of a frightening report about the likelihood of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapon terrorist attacks, the British government is utilising public fear of a stigmatised minority group to gain support for measures of which – if applied universally – the average person would
strongly disapprove.
Democracies require their citizens to believe that majoritarianism sufficiently rationalises the disadvantage of the minority. The reasoning behind this relies on the minority's faith that they can one day become supported by the majority.
For many Muslims today, the prospect of a non-Muslim British majority one day standing up for their rights and interests is far-fetched. They need to be persuaded that the system works and that this can happen and
has happened before.
I don't blame the government for searching for a political victory here. Before they call an election, Labour is in a fight for British minds, and progress in the struggle against terrorism makes for political success.
But progress against terrorism will only come if the government wins the fight for British Muslim minds too. I genuinely do not believe that it is too late. But this new policy suggests that our political leaders do.
Source
Justin Gest is co-director of the Migration Studies Unit and Ralph Miliband Scholar in Political Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research examines socio-political alienation among Muslim minorities in western democracies.