The pre-terrorists among us

The idea that there is no single, all-encompassing terrorist profile is now something of a conventional wisdom among scholars. Yet the notion that terrorists, like mythical demons, take on a recognizable shape, however spectral, is strongly implicit in CVE preventive thinking. In Britain, the face of CVE is the “Prevent” strategy, a putatively “community-led” approach first launched in April 2007 and now mandated by the U.K.’s 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act. Its central aims are to counter “the ideological challenge of terrorism,” and to offer “practical help to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.” Terrorism, as Prevent constructs it, isn’t a form of political activism that sentient people choose to engage in for reasons, however poorly conceived; rather, it’s an ideological contagion—a “disease,” as Cameron described it in February—that afflicts the vulnerable and “risks” their safety and well-being.

The British government’s radicalization “referral” program aims to stop this contagion through “early intervention” before it takes hold, though it’s not fully clear what such intervention actually involves. It is now a statutory obligation for specified community partners, including social workers, teachers, probation officers, and “credible community organisations,” to monitor for “vulnerability indicators” that suggest people are “turn[ing] towards terrorism,” and refer those who manifest these indicators to the authorities. Such indicators include “spending increasing time in the company of other suspected extremists;” “changing ... style of dress or personal appearance;” “loss of interest in other friends and activities not associated with the extremist ideology, group or cause;” “possession of material or symbols associated with an extremist cause;” blaming others “for all social or political ills;” and “using insulting or derogatory names or labels for another group.” Since ISIS’s dramatic rise to prominence last year, the number of referrals to the program has skyrocketed: There were 796 referrals this summer alone, more than in the entire first year of the program from 2012 to 2013.

Similar notions about how to detect radicalization underpin CVE programs in the United States, Canada, Australia, and France. A document the Australian government published last month warned that people undergoing radicalization can display “significant behavioural changes in major areas” of their lives, ranging in severity from “changes in normal behaviour” to expressions of hostility “towards people they see as the ‘enemy.’” The Royal Canadian Mountain Police, in a 2014 handbook co-produced with the Islamic Social Services Association and the National Council of Canadian Muslims, advised concerned parents to be aware of signs that can manifest in “at-risk youth,” such as “sudden onset of anti-social behaviour; spending excessive ... time online, especially at night when most of the family is asleep; ... excessive secrecy regarding what sites they are visiting online, where they are going, who they are meeting; ... [or] external and overt expression of hyper-religiosity.”

The danger of CVE is that it risks conflating the two and promotes an atmosphere of mistrust. There are many cases in which ordinary Muslims have been singled out and harassed—not for anything they may have done, but because of the suspicious minds of others, who see a Muslim man reading a scholarly book on terrorism and think “terrorist,” or who read support for Palestine as support for global jihadism. Even converts to radical Islam—or the “non-violent extremists” whose ideology Britain’s new strategy aims to counter, in addition to the violent variant—aren’t necessarily appropriate targets for suspicion. As the terrorism scholar John Horgan puts it, “The overwhelming majority of people who hold radical beliefs do not engage in violence … and … people who engage in terrorism don’t necessarily hold radical beliefs.”

Another major weakness of CVE lies in its naïve and imaginatively cramped view of social life, of which so much is theater, and where how people act is often at variance with their unvarnished “backstage” self. Erving Goffman, the foremost exponent of this “dramaturgical” view of social affairs, wrote that “a performer tends to conceal or underplay those activities, facts, and motives which are incompatible with an idealized version of himself,” and remarked on the prevalence of “disidentifiers”—affectations or props intended to convey normalcy—among stigmatized groups.

In his study of men who visited public restrooms in search of sex, Laud Humphreys described how the men, 54 percent of whom were married and living with their wives, would adopt conservative postures in public so as to detract from their then-illicit sexual liaisons with men and boys. In Goffman’s terminology, they were “disidentifying,” much like the 9/11 hijackers, who made a point of shaving their beards and visiting strip clubs prior to launching their attacks. (“How conveeenient,” Andrew Sullivan mordantly remarked about that stratagem.)

CVE seems blissfully ignorant of this theatrical dimension of everyday social life, and the lengths to which people go to conceal their innermost thoughts and feelings.

confuzzled dude wrote:

The idea that there is no single, all-encompassing terrorist profile is now something of a conventional wisdom among scholars. Yet the notion that terrorists, like mythical demons, take on a recognizable shape, however spectral, is strongly implicit in CVE preventive thinking. In Britain, the face of CVE is the “Prevent” strategy, a putatively “community-led” approach first launched in April 2007 and now mandated by the U.K.’s 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act. Its central aims are to counter “the ideological challenge of terrorism,” and to offer “practical help to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.” Terrorism, as Prevent constructs it, isn’t a form of political activism that sentient people choose to engage in for reasons, however poorly conceived; rather, it’s an ideological contagion—a “disease,” as Cameron described it in February—that afflicts the vulnerable and “risks” their safety and well-being.

The British government’s radicalization “referral” program aims to stop this contagion through “early intervention” before it takes hold, though it’s not fully clear what such intervention actually involves. It is now a statutory obligation for specified community partners, including social workers, teachers, probation officers, and “credible community organisations,” to monitor for “vulnerability indicators” that suggest people are “turn[ing] towards terrorism,” and refer those who manifest these indicators to the authorities. Such indicators include “spending increasing time in the company of other suspected extremists;” “changing ... style of dress or personal appearance;” “loss of interest in other friends and activities not associated with the extremist ideology, group or cause;” “possession of material or symbols associated with an extremist cause;” blaming others “for all social or political ills;” and “using insulting or derogatory names or labels for another group.” Since ISIS’s dramatic rise to prominence last year, the number of referrals to the program has skyrocketed: There were 796 referrals this summer alone, more than in the entire first year of the program from 2012 to 2013.

Similar notions about how to detect radicalization underpin CVE programs in the United States, Canada, Australia, and France. A document the Australian government published last month warned that people undergoing radicalization can display “significant behavioural changes in major areas” of their lives, ranging in severity from “changes in normal behaviour” to expressions of hostility “towards people they see as the ‘enemy.’” The Royal Canadian Mountain Police, in a 2014 handbook co-produced with the Islamic Social Services Association and the National Council of Canadian Muslims, advised concerned parents to be aware of signs that can manifest in “at-risk youth,” such as “sudden onset of anti-social behaviour; spending excessive ... time online, especially at night when most of the family is asleep; ... excessive secrecy regarding what sites they are visiting online, where they are going, who they are meeting; ... [or] external and overt expression of hyper-religiosity.”

The danger of CVE is that it risks conflating the two and promotes an atmosphere of mistrust. There are many cases in which ordinary Muslims have been singled out and harassed—not for anything they may have done, but because of the suspicious minds of others, who see a Muslim man reading a scholarly book on terrorism and think “terrorist,” or who read support for Palestine as support for global jihadism. Even converts to radical Islam—or the “non-violent extremists” whose ideology Britain’s new strategy aims to counter, in addition to the violent variant—aren’t necessarily appropriate targets for suspicion. As the terrorism scholar John Horgan puts it, “The overwhelming majority of people who hold radical beliefs do not engage in violence … and … people who engage in terrorism don’t necessarily hold radical beliefs.”

Another major weakness of CVE lies in its naïve and imaginatively cramped view of social life, of which so much is theater, and where how people act is often at variance with their unvarnished “backstage” self. Erving Goffman, the foremost exponent of this “dramaturgical” view of social affairs, wrote that “a performer tends to conceal or underplay those activities, facts, and motives which are incompatible with an idealized version of himself,” and remarked on the prevalence of “disidentifiers”—affectations or props intended to convey normalcy—among stigmatized groups.

In his study of men who visited public restrooms in search of sex, Laud Humphreys described how the men, 54 percent of whom were married and living with their wives, would adopt conservative postures in public so as to detract from their then-illicit sexual liaisons with men and boys. In Goffman’s terminology, they were “disidentifying,” much like the 9/11 hijackers, who made a point of shaving their beards and visiting strip clubs prior to launching their attacks. (“How conveeenient,” Andrew Sullivan mordantly remarked about that stratagem.)

CVE seems blissfully ignorant of this theatrical dimension of everyday social life, and the lengths to which people go to conceal their innermost thoughts and feelings.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/counterterrorism-prevention-britain-isis/412603/