The Politics of Preventing Violent Extremism: Liberal Democracy, Civil Society, and Countering Radicalization

’Preventing Violent Extremism’ policies have surged in the post 9/11 era - with most nations and International Organisations now implementing some form of ’PVE’. The Politics of Preventing Violent Extremism is built around the novel contention that citizens are vulnerable to extremist ideologies which warp their perceptions, desires, and actions. This is a fundamental reworking of how governments have understood their citizens; modernist assumptions about a rational decision-making subject have given way to understandings of a vulnerable subject who can, under pressure, be captured by extremist ideologies and turn towards subversive, even terrorist, actions.

The book explores the emergence and variation of PVE policies, using case studies from Britain, France, Norway, Finland, Croatia, Czechia, and Lithuania. Across Western, Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe, different tools are used to protect the citizenry from extremist influences and to reclaim their allegiance. Conceptions of civil society are particularly important for this work; civil society denotes a space outside direct government control where norms and values are shaped. This is where, for the PVE agenda, extremism lurks. In some countries, deep and exaggerated concerns are expressed by officials about the hostile takeover of societal space by extremist actors. In other countries, the threat to civil society is framed in more insidious terms as the failure of integrating migrants within society, and the exclusion and ’outsiderness’ that results, rather than deliberate attempts by extremists to colonise civil society space. This book demonstrates how PVE measures are shaped by national and regional conceptions of civil society and political culture, varying between highly individualised pre-crime referral programs in Britian, to integration-focused programs enacted by welfare state actors in the Nordics, to the absence of pre-crime interventions in constitutional republics like France, and the historic democracy protection agenda of Czechia.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Professor of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Sadi Shanaah, Research Fellow, University of Warwick

Charlotte Heath-Kelly is Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. She has received awards from the European Research Council and Wellcome Trust to explore how counterterrorism is entering the space of health and social care and has published her work in journals including Security Dialogue, International Political Sociology, Parliamentary Affairs, Theoretical Criminology and European Journal of International Security.

Sadi Shanaah is a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. He has worked as a Research Fellow on the ERC funded projects ’NeoliberalTerror’ and ’PeaceReturn’ in the PAIS department of the University of Warwick. His interests lie in the study of political violence and the socio-political effects of existential risk perception. He has published in journals such as Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, Social Problems, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Critical Studies on Terrorism.