The Postcolonial Challenge of (Counter)Terrorism for Academic Activism

• In Event: The Use of Decolonization Within Ethnic Studies, Refugee Studies, and Gender and Empire/Counter-Terrorism Discourses

Abstract

Objective

After the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York on the 11th of September 2001, counter-terrorism policy practice has become a transnational trend. US examples include The USA Patriot Act: Preserving Life and Liberty (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) in 2001 and the Executive Order: Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, colloquially referred to as Trump’s travel, or Muslim, ban. While counter-terrorism policy practices are prevalent in Australia, Canada, the US and the UK, and also have implications for education, the focus of this paper is the UK’s Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, because it specifies a legal obligation for educators and institutions working with young people at all levels to prevent people from being radicalised, or drawn into terrorism.

Objective of inquiry:

Given the direct and explicit legal implications for educators and educational institutions, this study asks: “What academic activism is possible after counter-terrorism policy practice that directly and legally obligates us?”

Data:
Governmental and institutional policy, training, and guidance documents are the focus of data analysis, along with evidence of resistance to Prevent Duty that are in the public domain. I also analyse three contexts through which I encounter the policy: (1) as a supervisor of graduate students who are studying Prevent Duty policy practice from various theoretical perspectives, (2) as a subject of my institution’s Prevent Duty training, and (3) as an audience member at a professional conference listening to a progress report for a large governmental grant that funded prevent duty activities in multiple sites.

Theoretical Perspective and Methods:
The study is based on policy and document analysis, as well as a post-qualitative (St. Pierre & Lather, 2014), postcolonial argument (Ahmed, 2000). I take a postcolonial position to understand the role of humanist notions of difference and territory in terrorism and counter-terrorism, as well as activism. In this way, the paper is conceptual and results in an argument for a postcolonial activism in academia (Curley, Rhee, Subedi, and Subreenduth, 2017).

Significance:

Part of our prevent duty is to report “concerns about extremism in a school or organisation that works with children, or if…a child might be a might be at risk of extremism” via a governmental email and helpline (UK Government Guidance, 2015, n.p.). The UK Department of Education published The Prevent duty: Departmental advice for schools and childcare providers in June of 2015, to guide educators on our prevent duty “to protect children from the risk of radicalisation” (p. 4). Resistance to the Prevent Duty policy, and how it is implemented and practiced, is wide-ranging and takes different standpoints, including concerns about suppressing political dissent; relying on racial and religious profiling; promoting outmoded (colonial) notions of “British values” and Islamophobia; eroding relationships among teachers, students, and families; demonizing the child subject; and legislating “thought-crime” in the Orwellian sense.

Author

• Stephanie Lynn Curley, Manchester Metropolitan University