Radicalisation, counter-radicalisation, and Prevent: A vernacular approach - Softcover

Jarvis, Lee ; Whiting, Andrew ; Macdonald, Stuart

9781526197863: Radicalisation, counter-radicalisation, and Prevent: A vernacular approach

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1526197863 ISBN 13: 9781526197863

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 2026

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This book offers the first sustained investigation into non-elite understandings of radicalisation and counter-radicalisation policy. Drawing on original focus group research with students from universities across England and Wales, the book explores how ‘ordinary’ citizens understand radicalisation, how they make sense of counter-radicalisation initiatives like the UK Prevent Strategy, and how they evaluate its functioning and effects across society. Radicalisation, counter-radicalisation and Prevent demonstrates that these non-elite insights often contradict and diverge from traditional (elite) security knowledge and thus shed new light on wider questions around the politics of security. This has vitally important implications not only for counter-radicalisation and counter-terrorism policy but for the very study and practice of security.

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About the Author

Michael Lister is Reader in Politics at Oxford Brookes University

From the Back Cover

Radicalisation, counter-radicalisation and Prevent offers a much-needed analysis of how ‘ordinary’ citizens make sense of ‘radicalisation’ as a security challenge, and how efforts to address this threat via counter-radicalisation initiatives are understood.

Counter-radicalisation initiatives, such as the UK Prevent Strategy, are controversial and heavily critiqued by academics, the media and community groups. Such criticism, however, remains limited because it rarely engages with the vernacular analyses of those potentially subject to such measures. To remedy this, the book draws on significant focus group research with students from universities across England and Wales to establish how radicalisation is understood in vernacular discourse; to explore competing understandings of the Prevent Strategy, its aspirations, and implementation; and to consider how those who have become a focus of the strategy feel about its design, implementation and social consequences. The book shows that vernacular constructions of (counter-)radicalisation demonstrate important ambiguities and contradictions within commonly held assumptions about the meaning, possibility and desirability of security policy. These ambiguities are vitally important not only for understanding counter-radicalisation and counter-terrorism, but for the study and practice of security more broadly.

The book will be essential reading for students, scholars and practitioners working on such issues across fields including politics, criminology, law, international relations, sociology and beyond.

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