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An accessible resource on the role of teachers in perpetuating inequality through Prevent Duty, with guidance on how to change teaching practice to empower Muslim students.

The paper uses critical race theory (CRT) to interrogate power and Whiteness in the interaction of teachers and students when complying with Prevent Duty and delivering lessons on fundamental British values. This is illustrated through a constructed narrative between three characters in a London school, and offers a Freirean approach to empowering students through Prevent delivery.

A disproportionately White profession is acting in what they perceive to be the best interest of their students, while failing to interrogate their own position of power and not creating opportunities to be guided by Muslim voices. As a consequence Muslim students continue to be oppressed.

Teachers can disrupt Prevent Duty while complying with its legal obligations by interrogating their own position of Whiteness. They can work with students to ensure Muslim voices lead discussion around Prevent and the inequality in society that is being reproduced by Prevent Duty.

There is potential for good teaching practice to overcome the structural racism and continued inequality experienced by diverse Muslim communities.

The paper is an accessible application of CRT to Prevent Duty, a resource for teachers, students and activists. It can help in the recognition of the potential for even well-meaning teachers to act in ways that perpetuate inequalities. It provides a clear set of suggestions for teaching practices that can overcome this.

Purpose – UK laws surrounding the duty to prevent individuals being drawn into terrorism often focus on the need to safeguard the populace from exploitation by terrorist or extremist groups. It is within this context that countering violent extremism (CVE) work often takes place. This chapter explores how this legal duty shapes CVE projects in the UK, drawing on practitioner’s perspectives.

Methods – Writing from the perspective of practitioners from ConnectFutures, an organization that has been operating since 2013 in the UK and internationally, who advocate for a contextual safeguarding approach to provide a more holistic attitude to the prevention of violent extremism and exploitation.

Findings – Exploring the intersections between multiple forms of criminal exploitation, as well as engaging in the spaces and places young people experience harm, allows practitioners working in the CVE space to contribute to the protection of individuals from terrorist and extremist radicalization.

Originality/Value – Applying the new developed contextual safeguarding framework to CVE projects provides a contemporary and alternative ways to conduct CVE work. The chapter provides overviews of three CVE projects running with young people today in the UK, exploring how the new frameworks are adopted within these programs, all designed to address the complex causes of violent extremism.

The UK government’s attempt to “prevent” terrorism and extremism in the university sector is rightly seen as an intolerant threat to academic freedom. However, this development has not come from a “right wing” authoritarian impulse, but rather, replicates many of the discussions already taking place in universities about the need to protect “vulnerable” students from offensive and dangerous ideas. Historically, the threat to academic freedom came from outside the university, from pressures exerted from governments, from religious institutions who oversaw a particular institution or from the demands of business. Alternatively it has been seen as something that is a particular problem in non-Western countries that do not have democracy. While some of these problems and pressures remain, there is a more dangerous threat to academic freedom that comes from within universities, a triumvirate of a relativistic academic culture, a new body of identity-based student activists and a therapeutically oriented university management, all three of which have helped to construct universities as safe spaces for the newly conceptualized “vulnerable student.” With reference to the idea of vulnerability, this chapter attempts to chart and explain these modern developments.

The purpose of this paper is to present the concept of institutions as compliant environments, using data to monitor and enforce compliance with a range of external policies and initiatives, using the particular example of UK higher education (HE) institutions. The paper differs from previous studies by bringing together a range of policies and uses of data covering different areas of HE and demonstrating how they contribute to the common goal of compliance.

The compliant environment is defined in this context and the author has applied the preliminary model to a range of policies and cases that use and reuse data from staff and students in HE.

The findings show that the focus on compliance with these policies and initiatives has resulted in a high level of surveillance of staff and students and a lack of resistance towards policies that work against the goals of education and academia.

This is the first study to bring together the range of areas in which policy compliance and data processing are entwined in HE. The study contributes to the academic literature on data and surveillance and on academic institutions as organisations.

The paper offers suggestions for resistance to compliance and data processing initiatives in HE.

This is the first study to bring together the range of areas in which policy compliance and data processing are entwined in HE. The study contributes to the academic literature on data and surveillance and on academic institutions as organisations.

This paper aims to explore the tripart relationship between British police officers, Local Authority representatives and community members based on a Midlands neighbourhood case study. It focuses on experiences of the strengths and challenges with working towards a common purpose of community safety and resilience building.

Data was collected in 2019 prior to enforced COVID lockdown restrictions following Staffordshire University ethical approval. An inductive qualitative methods approach of semi-structured individual and group interviews was used with community members (N = 30) and professionals (N = 15), using a purposive and snowball sample. A steering group with academic, police and Local Authority representation co-designed the study and identified the first tier of participants.

Community members and professionals valued tripart working and perceived communication, visibility, longevity and trust as key to addressing localised community safety issues. Challenges were raised around communication modes and frequency, cultural barriers to accessing information and inadequate resources and responses to issues. Environmental crime was a high priority for community members, along with tackling drug-related crime and diverting youth disorder, which concurred with police concern. However, the anti-terrorism agenda was a pre-occupation for the Local Authority, and school concerns included modern slavery crime.

When state involvement and investment in neighbourhoods decline, community member activism enthusiasm for neighbourhood improvement reduces, contrasting with government expectations. Community members are committed partnership workers who require the state to visibly and demonstrably engage. Faith in state actors can be restored when professionals are consistently present, communicate and follow up on actions.

Despite the end of conflict in 1995, Bosnia–Herzegovina still suffers from unresolved ethnic and social tensions, where fostering social cohesion, active citizenship and mitigating ethnonationalist tensions and politically motivated violence remains among the main goals to achieve transformative peace. This paper, based on quantitative analyses of 3,637 adult respondents, shows that the tendency of Bosnians to be active or violent citizens sometimes overlaps and are not very distinct patterns of behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to identify factors that differentiate pathways and help explain (un)civil civic behaviours and inform the work of peace and development actors.

The paper is based on a quantitative household survey conducted with a representative sample of 3,637 adults in Bosnia and by using a wide range of statistical tools from scaling to correlation analysis. This data set measures factors and conceptual notions associated with passive, constructive and aggressive civic tendencies and social cohesion in a nuanced way by using different metrics and scales. The survey was designed and conducted by The Centre for Sustainable Peace and Democratic Development (SeeD) and the Bosnia–Herzegovina Resilience Initiative in 2020, in partnership with The United States Agency for International Development (USAID)/The Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) and The International Organization for Migration (IOM) for the SCORE Bosnia–Herzegovina study (SeeD, 2020).

Overall, the factors that were discovered to be linked to the manifestation of constructive and aggressive civic tendencies are multidimensional, and range from intergroup relations (e.g. tension, tolerance) to political and civic attitudes (e.g. ethnonationalism, civic responsibility, gender equality), from individual traits (e.g. education, economic stress) to the media landscape (e.g. information consumption). While the empirical evidence shows that some of these factors can push citizens towards both active and violent civic behaviours simultaneously, this study identifies and distinguishes those that can reduce aggressive civic tendencies while increasing constructive civic tendencies.

This paper proposes a replicable approach and evidence-based conclusions which can help validate the theories of change for the peace and development actors to ensure that scarce peacebuilding resources are invested where the impact is greatest, and the actors can protect the sanctity of their responsibility to do no harm.

This paper seeks to provide a robust empirical understanding for more effective policy-making and programming that can support Bosnia–Herzegovina’s endogenous resilience against socio-political shocks and transformative peace trajectory. This paper seeks to demonstrate how peace and development actors can build and use an evidence-base for understanding civic behaviours and as a result formulate tailored efforts with greater likelihood of impact. This would help fulfil commitments towards sustainable development goals and the 2030 global agenda (UN General Assembly, 2015).

This study contributes insights to the emerging literature at the nexus of peacebuilding, individual skills/attitudes and civic behaviour. While the conclusions are highly contextual, the methodology is informed by multidisciplinary literature and is replicable in other post-conflict and non-conflict contexts, and thus can be used for cross-country comparisons and theory building around civic activism and constructive citizenship. The approach distinguishes between passive citizens, constructive activists, aggressive activists and purely violent citizens. This study discovers that the bifurcation is between passive citizens and active citizens, and although constructive and aggressive civic tendencies might be theorised to be contradictory, they overlap and tend to co-occur.