Peaceful Extremists

In many ways the Alternative Act of Remembrance in Tavistock Square on Sunday 13th November that was led by the Peace Pledge Union was similar to the usual acts in Whitehall and at war memorials and churches around the country. It was somber and it was reflective but it was quieter and smaller and, counterintuitively for a pacifist event, was more angry than other ceremonies that I have attended in recent years. One speaker reflected on having a recent vigil at the Cenotaph broken up by the police and suggested that the peace movement had become 'the extremists'. Unlike other users of this word that I have referred to in this blog, this author recognised 'extremist' as a relative term and appreciated that the judgement of such a person is in the eye of the beholder. Failure to recognise this is a dangerous way of looking at the world for it risks a situation where the promoters of violence become the televised norm and the pacifists are moved on to hold their small and dignified vigil out of sight in a leafy park. With as great a flow of refugees from war-torn areas as ever before and any challenge to the flow of arms in the other direction perceived as 'extreme', those calling for peace have got a lot to be angry about.

Can You Teach Peace?

It was a pleasure to speak at King's Think Tank event on Education and Counterterrorism alongside Professor Tahir Abbas (Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute), Professor Gwen Griffith-Dickson (Founder and Director of the Lokahi Foundation and Visiting Professor at King's College London), Dr Rizwaan Sabir, (Lecturer in Criminology at Liverpool John Moores University) and Abu Ahmed (Head, Training and Engagement team OSCT Prevent Unit, Home Office). Below is an approximation of what I had to say but does not include the extensive debate that followed after Abu had laid out the Home Office case for PREVENT. I tend to agree with the audience members who pointed out that the argument for PREVENT is focused on effects (of foreign policy, marginalisation, poverty, PREVENT itself) rather than considering addressing the causes of violence. Gwen made a good point about ‘Occupying PREVENT’ but it’s hard to see how schools could be empowered to do this when they are so fearful of negative judgement from OfSTED, an organisation that is now focused on ensuring that schools are adopting PREVENT.

In response to the title of this event, “yes, you can teach peace”. Teachers know that when you create classrooms where debate flows freely, views that at first appear extreme are aired and challenged. Students and teachers alike are challenged on their views and we all appear and become less extreme.

Unfortunately in 2014, the Muslim students in my classes stopped engaging in these debates. Teaching in Tower Hamlets where 90-100% of the students in any class are Muslim, this had a profound impact and gave me great cause for concern and led to me carrying out research to find out what was going on. I have run a focus group for the Tower Hamlets Overview and Scrutiny Committee into Prevent, interviewed many pupils from across the country and spoken to hundreds of students who I teach, I have heard it repeated that students are scared to practice their religion and that they do not feel comfortable to speak openly with adults. Students include their teachers and parents in those that they don’t speak openly with and while it was initially only Muslim students saying this non-Muslims have also started saying this more recently. Questioning students on the causes for their concerns, the universal reply is that they fear being reported to the security services under the PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy and that this was causing them to alter their behaviour. Analysis of the PREVENT Strategy reveals to be the embodiment of what might be referred to as discourses of ‘radicalisation’ and of ‘extremism’.

The first thing to note is that political discourses centred on ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ developed after 9/11. In fact, you will struggle to find these words used in explanations of 9/11 in the subsequent few years. It’s notable that Giovanna Borradori’s book recording interviews with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in New York in the 3 weeks following the tragedy of 9/11 ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ do not appear. In the following years they appear but as political concepts that have no implicit association with violence; the best example of this is the PREVENT Strategy from 2008 which creates such a distinction by only using the terms alongside references to violence, associating them but drawing a distinction for if they were the same they would not be used together. However, in the glossary of the strategy from 2011 that we now follow, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ are defined by their association with violence. These words that previously described relative political stances have become synonymous with violence.

By fixing political opponents to these violent definitions, we are placed in an essentialised world where radicals are people who support meaningless acts of violence rather than people who might conceivably alter the way we interact with and view the world. Further analysis of news and other government documentation suggests that this violent usage has been accepted and was confirmed earlier this summer in a High Court ruling (The London Borough of Tower Hamlets v B [2016]) that stated that the definitions for ‘extremism’ and ‘radicalisation’ that are found in PREVENT are ‘so much a part of contemporary life they scarcely need definition’.

Acceptance of the new meaning from the more recent 2011 Strategy, that radicalisation leads to the support of violence, cuts off the avenues by which peaceful political reform might be achieved. This presents subjects of the strategy with a choice, if they value peace over political change this may result in the suppression of discourse that is in opposition to the Government. However, those who desire ‘political change and social reform’ more than they are opposed to violence might have violent or terrorist identities reinforced. It’s important to appreciate here that what we say does not only describe the world, it informs understanding, action and agency, creating identities. This is why parents and teachers alike know to catch the naughty child doing good rather than to keep scolding them for being bad.

PREVENT is a strategy that reveals an aspiration to a politics of consent. I’ll not go into my text analysis now as it’s almost needless to point out that a rhetoric that casts radical or extreme views as pathologically violent presumes that it’s own stance is unassailable. An aspiration to consent might at first appear to be a noble aim but recent philosophers and political theorists have pointed out how this undermines democracy in a plural society and is likely  to result in the inadvertent promotion of violence.

Belgian political theorist, Chantalle Mouffe has written that ‘it is undeniable that it [violence] tends to flourish in circumstances in which there are no legitimate political channels for the expression of grievances’ (2005: 81) and she describes the shutting down of discourse in a democracy as ‘letting death in’.

In the late French philosopher, Jacques Derrida’s, conversations on 9/11 and since then he has described the autoimmunity of liberalism and how this aspiration to consensual politics results in violence (Borradori 2003).

And, Przeworski (1991) similarly suggests that a failure to be represented by the democratic process might leave violence as the only option for those excluded.

The application of the PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy in schools casts teachers as informants. Under these new conditions my pupils and pupils across the country have stopped engaging in the political debate that Mouffe, Derrida and Przeworski see as vital for peace in a democracy. The aligning of political opposition with violence adds a catalyst to this already dangerous situation.

Tonight we should therefore not be discussing whether we can tolerate the repressive logic of counter-extremism and anti-radicalisation strategies in our schools. We need to specifically discuss how they are undermining the mediating and peacemaking mechanisms of our democracy. This ultimately leads to a call for the abandonment of the use of teachers as informants as is demanded by PREVENT.

Having called for the abandonment of PREVENT, I’ll offer an example to demonstrate how education can teach peace in the absence of this strategy. In 2013 I was a form tutor to a particularly lively class, we would meet every morning and afternoon and we would discuss the news of the day. In one particularly heated encounter, a group cited the Koran to argue that gay people should be denied equal rights. Not surprisingly, the ensuing argument got very heated and lasted for a more than a few days as I vehemently challenged this view along with many of my students. A few months later in July 2013, when the Equal Marriage Act was being debated in Parliament, the same students raised the topic again. This time, arguing that it was surely right and kind to call a union between any people a marriage, no matter what their sexuality, a view that they had heard from me in the earlier debate. I had also learned from them, that they were not trying to be difficult, extreme or radical in their earlier assertions, they were responding in a non-critical manner to received wisdom. A year later a local PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy had been implemented in the school and these same boys were among those who informed me that they no longer engage in political debates because they fear being reported under PREVENT. As one of them had quoted the Koran to justify harming gay men in our earlier discussion, they were right to fear that they would be reported. And this is the problem, with PREVENT in schools these debates will not happen, these extreme views will not see the light of day and will not be challenged.

I am sure that the work of The Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism is vital in keeping us safe but we need to have a serious discussion about the aspect of their work that is counterproductive and that is where these strategies are applied to educational settings, places where trust and respect are pre-requisites. Counter-extremism and anti-radicalisation strategies in educational spaces are restricting debate. We need to open education up to the promotion of criticality, something that is being restricted by oppressive testing regimes and well meaning counter-terrorism duties. It is through this promotion of debate that education can contribute to a more harmonious society, offering students the tools to challenge dogma that they might encounter now and in the future. Critical citizens are also required to resist the otherwise unchallenged acceptance of the violent subjectivities that are promoted in the discourses of ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ that damagingly associate politically diverse thought with violence. We must free teachers from their duties as informants so that they can return to being facilitators of debates that can promote peace.