AVERT Seminar
The State of British Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE)
Professor Paul Thomas
(University of Huddersfield, UK)
Monday 6 March 2023
4:00 – 5:30pm AEDT
Deakin Downtown, Tower 2, Level 12, 727 Collins Street, Melbourne (and via Zoom)
Britain’s P/CVE strategy, Prevent, reaches its twentieth anniversary in 2023. Highly influential on P/CVE internationally, Prevent nevertheless remains controversial at home despite considerable change in the assumptions, priorities, and methods within the Prevent Strategy over time, as the newly released Prevent Review makes clear.
Several inter-related key themes highlight these controversies, which are also relevant to P/CVE internationally. One is what, and therefore whom, P/CVE is really concerned with. The new Prevent review recommends refocusing primarily on ‘international’ (shorthand for IS/AQ-inspired) violent extremism at the expense of the extreme right and other forms of extremism.
Allied to this are challenges to Prevent’s key operational framing (especially through the mandatory reporting duty) of ‘safeguarding’ individuals identified as ‘vulnerable’ to violent extremist involvements as both infantilising and as obscuring actor agency and responsibility. Yet research shows such framing has been central to the acceptance of Prevent by frontline practitioners and by communities.
A third issue is the relationship between ‘extremism’ and ‘violent extremism’, and where Prevent policy and practice sits in the wider policy architecture involving countering extremism and integration/community cohesion initiatives. This presentation will analyse these developments and interrogate the relevance of Prevent’s issues for P/CVE internationally.
Paul Thomas is Professor of Youth and Policy and Associate Dean (Research) in the Huddersfield Centre for Research in Education and Society (HudCRES) at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Paul’s research focusses on how Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) and broader multiculturalist policies have been implemented and enacted by ground-level practitioners and experienced by communities.
He is the author of Responding to the Threat of Violent Extremism: Failing to Prevent (Bloomsbury, 2012) and many articles on P/CVE and tackling youth racism in leading international journals. His latest book (with Miah and Sanderson) is ‘Race’, Space and Place in Northern England (2020). Thomas and Professor Michele Grossman are currently working on North American replications of the Community Reporting Thresholds research. Paul is a qualified youth and community worker and previously worked for a national youth work organisation and on youth issues for the UK Government’s Commission for Racial Equality.