The Broadening Remit of UK Counter-Terrorism - from Terrorism to ‘Radicalization’ to ‘Extremism’: C-T Imperative or Loss of Focus?

This article argues that the discourses of radicalization and, more lately, of extremism have served to confuse the remit of counter-terrorism. Indeed, it appears that ‘terrorism’, ‘radicalization’ and ‘extremism’ have increasingly become merged into a single discursive framework, one consequence of which has been to blur the important distinction between ‘extremism’ of thought and ‘extremism’ of method, and which has therefore arguably seen counter-terrorism lose its focus in the UK. This seems to be particularly evident in the C-T policy concern with ‘extremist’ but non-violent ideology that is nevertheless deemed to be ‘conducive’ to terrorism.1 Such a notion of non-violent ideology as itself having some kind of intrinsic link to terrorism would to most seasoned terrorism scholars be something of a paradox – for terrorism is conventionally understood as ineluctably about violence or the threat of violence, and if a non-violent ideology is culpable for terrorism in some way then it ceases to become non-violent.