the British government increased its efforts to prevent violent extremism, introducing a series of policies and measures designed to counter political and religiously motivated violence (see Schmid, 2013; Thomas, 2012). In the last decade, serious terrorist attacks have occurred across Europe in France, Belgium, the UK, Turkey and Denmark. Contemporarily, anxieties about ‘home-grown’ terrorism have risen up political and policy agendas, with attention becoming focused on European citizens travelling to Syria and Iraq to engage in conflict. After the January and November 2015 attacks in Paris, widespread concerns have been expressed that individuals fighting with Islamist militants in conflict zones in the Middle East will become ‘radicalised’ and may return to commit atrocities in Europe (see Francis, 2015). In the UK, extant anxieties about radicalisation rendered explicit after the 7/7 attacks have escalated after the emergence of violence committed by British citizens active within ISIS, most notably Mohammed Enwazi, dubbed in the media as ‘Jihadi John’. These concerns form part of the contextual backdrop in which the wide-ranging legislative powers sanctioned in Crime, Terrorism and Security Act (2015) were introduced. This Act permits the passports of British citizens returning to the UK to be seized if they are suspected of involvement of terrorism and also sanctions the implementation of exclusion orders to prevent individuals thought to have engaged in terrorism overseas from re-entering the country. Whilst the 2015 attacks in Paris caution against dismissing the risk of individuals being trained in foreign countries returning to conduct attacks in the West, the question as to what exactly it is that motivates individuals to get involved with non State organisations that systematically deploy violence remains open. It is a complex question that produces diffuse answers. In the UK, the intelligence services have sought to identify common factors in the cases of individuals that turn to organised violence, while internationally academic researchers have sought to investigate the root causes of violent extremism (see Borum, 2011; Dalgaard-Nielsen, 2010; Horgan, 2009). While necessarily broad and cross-disciplinary, these efforts have resulted in
at inception by a sizeable tranche of funding - over 180 million pounds - distributed across three government Departments: the Home Office, the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The PREVENT strategy was originally constituted by five overarching objectives, subsequently limited to three in the current version published in 2011: to respond to the ideological challenge of terrorism and the threat we face from those who promote it; to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism and to work with sectors and institutions where there are risks of radicalisation which need to be addressed (HM Government, 2011: 7). As social policy scholars have noted, the implementation of the PREVENT strategy was plagued by internal contests and conflicts. The allocation of funding across different government departments with competing organizational logics and different interpretations of PREVENT produced problems from the outset, with the tension between community cohesion aspirations and preventative interventions generating cleavages (see Ratcliffe, 2012; Thomas, 2010). Furthermore, research into the external effects of particular counter-terrorism initiatives housed under the PREVENT umbrella raised serious concerns about the surveillant aspects of the strategy, particularly those directed squarely at Muslim communities (see Awan, 2013; Mythen, Walklate and Khan, 2009). As Kundnani’s (2009) systematic evaluation of PREVENT demonstrates, policies pursued under the PREVENT strategy have discriminated against Muslim Minority Groups, reproduced divisions between the police and targeted communities and damaged community relations. Given the aspiration to counter radicalisation through a wide variety of policy measures, it is perhaps unsurprising that the PREVENT strategy has been party to challenges regarding its focus and implementation (see Dodd, 2009; Travis, 2011). These criticisms led to a revised version of the strategy being implemented in 2011, which was more oriented toward interventions on the basis of risk and vulnerability and divorced community cohesion activities (Heath-Kelly, 2013). Noteworthy
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