‘Either a sell-out or an extremist’: Examining the experiences of Muslim and minority ethnic practitioners implementing Prevent and the Counter-Extremism Strategy in Birmingham

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, minoritised practitioners have been commissioned to deliver on the government’s counter-terrorism and counter-extremism (CT/CE) strategies in attempts to successfully engage target communities to which they are perceived to possess access. While much research has been carried out into the operational failures of the UK’s CT/CE policies from a top-down level, and the stigmatising impact this has had on Britain’s Muslim communities from the ground up, there remains a limited body of research on the experiences of practitioners, particularly those from Muslim and minority ethnic backgrounds, who often find themselves ‘stuck in the middle’ navigating spheres of both community and policy. This thesis seeks to address this gap by investigating the experiences of Muslim and minoritised individuals involved in the implementation of Prevent and the Counter-Extremism Strategy in Birmingham, a longstanding Prevent priority area dually administering the strategies through its local authority and regional police counter-terrorism unit. Based on ethnographic and interview data of city council employees, police officers, civil society organisations, and independently commissioned practitioners conducted over a two-year period, the study attempts to offer insight into the operationalisation of local policy and examine how its nuances and idiosyncrasies affect the experiences of those tasked with its implementation. It considers how a ‘middle space’ is created and resisted, how religion and other frameworks are drawn upon to guide and limit engagement in the field, and how ambiguity and fractures inherent in policy centrally create fissures in activity on the ground locally. It argues that within these apertures practitioners are able to exercise agency, shaping – but not necessarily subverting – policy for the fulfilment of myriad communal, personal, spiritual or financial ambitions. The study is situated within literature acknowledging both the pernicious effects of CT/CE policy as well as recognising the possibility for individual agency on behalf of those who engage. Its central tenet argues that Prevent has become a Frankenstein policy; revised, augmented, interlinked with efforts such as the Counter-Extremism Strategy, framed in the vernacular of contemporary discourses and then reshaped back to a version of where it began – multiple times in multiple ways – and that this is reflected in the local space. The conceptual framework adopted draws together various mid-range theories to respond to the rich and nuanced data captured. Literature on critical community practice grounds an understanding of the practitioner at the heart of the study. Concepts from scholarship on governance, responsibilisation, active citizenship, street-level bureaucracy, and agentive action are complemented by research on motivations and the intersections of religion and political participation, social action and citizenship to form a theoretical repertoire which is instrumental in providing a reflexive dimension to data analysis. This repertoire, and the data it makes sense of, can be understood within significant broader discourse around the engagement of Britain’s Muslim communities with the state and debates on policy development and design.