Governing through the prevention of extremism : the Security Council’s P/CVE as a dispositif of liberal government

Abstract

This article analyses the UN Security Council’s Prevention and Countering of Violent Extremism (P/CVE) as a Foucauldian dispositif of liberal government. Centred on early-detection, P/CVE tasks civil society with the prevention of extremism at a social level. In this sense, as the article illustrates, P/CVE displays features of liberal governmentality as it relies on civil society’s liberty and self-regulation mechanisms. Furthermore, as the article shows, P/CVE also works as a liberal mechanism of subjectification as it sketches the ‘(undesirable) extremists’ and the ‘(desirable) moderates’. These subjectivities emerge at the intersection of various global power structures (re)assembled by the same dispositif. Therefore, analysing P/CVE as a Foucauldian dispositif of liberal government allows us to grasp how power circulates in society in heterarchical, subtle ways. Moreover, it also uncovers how liberal government works through the (re)production of hierarchical, racialised, and gendered social structures in its differentiations of the (governed) freedom produced.