Orientalism causes massive racialized fear of radicalization and therefore, terrorism.

Sharma is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Communications at Brunel University London.)

Popular media has reinforced simplistic notions of radicalization, and played an influential role in securing consent for racialized counterterrorism strategies. Numerous studies outline the hostile representation of Muslim migrants, particularly in promoting spurious links to terrorism (cf. Nacos, 2016; Said, 1997). Furthermore, increasingly gendered accounts of radicalization have circulated, including those concerning so- called “Jihadi brides,” which play on Orientalist tropes of the fervency, culpability, and inscrutability of believers of Islam (Jacoby, 2015). These discourses of radicalization have legitimized an increasingly preemptive and militarized model of law enforcement. “What we ... see is a profound sway in the tenor of temporality: the realignment from reactive to preemptive is a conversion from past- tense subject formation to future-tense subject anticipation” (Puar, 2007, pp. 154–155). Indicative of the blurring of the lines between police and military action, war and peace, and domestic and foreign policy (Graham, 2011; McCulloch & Pickering, 2009) is the institutionalization of a mass counterterrorism surveillance agenda. The revelations by Edward Snowden exposed the illicit surveillance practices of Western states, especially the National Security Agency (NSA) and the “Five Eyes alliance,” involving the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Farrell, 2013). In Britain, the multi-intelligence gathering and analysis practices of counter- terrorism policing are coordinated with daily procedures of other public and private bodies through Prevent, a controversial strand of the British government’s counter- terrorism strategy. Prevent purports to “reduce the threat to the UK from terrorism by stopping people becoming terrorists and supporting terrorism” (HM Government, 2015, p. 2). However, it stems from the racializing, depoliticizing, and pathologizing notion of radicalization discussed above. While Prevent officially looks to disrupt all forms of extremism across all communities, it inevitably institutionalizes a strategy of surveillance that primarily impacts Muslim communities (Murtuja & Tufail, 2017).

Prevent initially operated on a voluntary basis. However, the UK Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill (2015) makes it compulsory for workers in areas including education, youth work, and healthcare to report to the police any religious views, displays of allegiance and affiliation, and/or behavioral patterns recognized by Prevent as “indicators” of radicalization. The integration of law enforcement into schooling and social service provision, indicative of a “total policing” agenda that creates “Stasi-like networks of surveillance and bureaucracy” (Webber, 2015), is not new, since it was evident as early as the 1970s in response to “black criminality” (Carby, 1982). Nonetheless, the “total policing” of the threat of terror merges multi-agency and preemptive approaches to law enforcement, by institutionalizing a surveillance program that requires policing and non- policing agencies to gather information based on risk assessment, rather than criminality (Kundnani, 2016). This intelligence is used to calculate whether individuals (principally Muslims) are “at risk” of radicalization.