Legitimising countering extremism at an international level: the role of the United Nations Security Council

Abstract

This chapter investigates the standardisation and legitimisation of countering extremism at an international level. Based on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), it examines the UN Security Council’s discourse on extremism. It is argued here that the concept has problematically been assigned a wide range of meanings, encompassing phenomena that go from physical violence to behaviours and even ideas. The Council has reflected but also mutually constituted this shift in the global discourse on terrorism, broadening and legitimising States’ and the same organ’s exceptional powers. Moreover, in virtue of its legal and political powers, it has also established international bodies and legal norms, enforcing them on States. Discussing these processes, the chapter analyses what is thus better conceptualised as a Foucauldian dispositif of extremism. Through this, the UNSC enforced global, standardised governmentality. In the name of fighting and preventing extremism, this governmentality encompassed the public and political realm, but also the private and domestic sphere.