The alignment of education with actions to prevent radicalisation of young people is a global phenomenon and is reflected in the plethora of initiatives emerging from trans-European networks such as the Radicalisation Awareness Network. However, the United Kingdom is unique in its approach by placing specific legal responsibility for preventing radicalisation on education institutions (see Busher & Jerome, 2020).
In England, government counter-terrorism legislation places lecturers in higher education (HE) in a complex position. Introduced in 2015, Section 26 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act (CTSA) compels lecturers to have due regard to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism. Known as the ‘Prevent Duty’ (hereafter Prevent) this act of public policy embedded the functions of state security into the everyday roles of lecturers in HE through structures of welfare and safeguarding. Critiquing Prevent as a panoptic scheme (Foucault, 1991) reveals the ways in which the formal structures of state security govern the actions of educators and learners. Lecturers are deputised into performing state counter-terrorism functions in their classrooms through surveillance and reporting of students deemed at risk of radicalisation (Whiting et al., 2020). Concerns for state security have entered the pedagogical space where students are constructed as risky subjects and academic debate about counter-terrorism generates risky knowledge (Danvers, 2021).
