Law, education and prevent

One morning Josef K. awakens to find a strange man at his door who tells him that he has been arrested. To his complete bemusement, K’s life becomes entwined within a trial and the proceedings of the court, the reasons for which are not only withheld from K himself but are also withheld from the reader. Franz Kafka’s famous text The Trial of which Josef K. is the protagonist, can not only be interpreted as the human inability to find meaning in a perpetual search for answers but rather, more significantly for this present discussion, it is a demonstration of law’s extra-judicial power. It is within this conceptual backdrop that one can arguably situate Britain’s Prevent legislation. Described as a ‘soft approach’ to counter-terrorism, the Prevent strategy has emerged within the government’s larger counter-terrorism strategy titled CONTEST, developed in 2003 and revised in 2009 and 2011. Chiefly, Prevent places statutory demands on schools and universities in Britain to enforce the United Kingdom’s Counter Terrorism and Security Act passed in 2015. Outwardly facing, Prevent’s focus is on combatting forms of extremism that it describes as ‘vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values . [which] . include: democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs’ (HM Government, 2015: 3). In doing so, it places a duty onto educational institutions actively to ‘prevent radicalization’ and ‘promote British values’. Inwardly facing, Prevent is highly contested and has been subjected to far-reaching criticism, having been vociferously challenged in popular media and notably by the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT). For us, Prevent’s ‘soft’ counter-terrorism approach is not only problematic because it mandates legal intervention in educational settings on contested terms but also because it is an example of a wider shift in justice and criminal accusation. Kafka’s story of Josef K. provides an apt legal metaphor to depict what scholars like Andrew Ashworth and Lucia Zedner (2014) call ‘preventive justice’, which is a newly emerging form of justice that already criminalises its subjects long before they try to attack anyone else’s interests. Under preventive justice measures, laws, such as the Prevent legislation, empower the authorities to intervene in human lives in the name of justice, but on the grounds of suspicion alone. In this regard, Britain’s Prevent policy as it intersects with education provides an apt example through which to bring to the fore a focus on the relation between law, citizenship, education and justice, as the scholars in this Special Issue do. Indeed, much like Kafka’s Trial reveals, each contribution in this Special Issue explores the oblique nature of the law and its emergence in the Prevent legislation in terms of its expansion into educational discourse through the curriculum, due processes in teacher education, and through the very values that underpin education. Each paper, in different ways, thus illustrates the diffuse nature of these legal processes and the ways in which these legal processes call people forward as both the objects and the subjects of law in potentially unjust ways. 706017 ESJ0010.1177/1746197917706017Education, Citizenship and Social JusticeEditorial editorial2017