Resisting the Prevent Duty—A Typology of Everyday Resistance

Abstract

The British government’s Prevent Duty puts a legal obligation on civilians employed in health, education, and social work sectors to “prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.” The policy repurposes safeguarding and duty of care principles embedded within these sectors to establish a regime of control where frontline staff have to take up surveillance duties. Given the statutory nature of the policy, compliance is mandatory. However, within the everyday enactment of Prevent Duty, we can also find people pushing back against its stipulations or working around them. Using everyday resistance and Foucauldian counter-conducts, this paper will demonstrate that while counter-terrorism technologies co-opt public sector sites and practices to establish structures of surveillance, resistance is still possible. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with medical staff, educators, and social workers in England, this paper will put forward a typology of everyday resistance to capture the different ways in which frontline staff tasked with counter-terror obligations challenge the Prevent Duty and reclaim the spaces and acts securitized by this policy.