“Don’t bring race into it”: white ignorance, UK counterterrorism and the impact agenda

ABSTRACT

Based on interviews with UK civil servants working on counterterrorism, this article examines how racialised and gendered organisational norms govern the production and circulation of knowledge in government departments. It further reflects on their implications for policymakers and academics seeking to introduce critical perspectives into counterterrorism policymaking. Mobilising Charles W. Mills’s concept of white ignorance, I explore how routinised practices serve to suppress knowledge about the racialised impacts of UK counterterrorism, and particularly the Prevent programme, within policymaking spaces. The article outlines eight practices that effect the suppression or delegitimisation of testimony substantiating critiques of counterterrorism policies as racist: framing accusations of racism as misunderstandings; focusing on intentions over impacts; self-silencing; limiting what counts as evidence; framing critics as emotionally-oriented; decisions concerning who participates in these policy discussions in the first place; the siloing of discussions about racism in dedicated spaces; and efforts to frame analyses of structural racism as breaking civil servants’ obligation to political neutrality. I conclude that, because the persistence of colonial counterterrorism practices is, fundamentally, not a problem of knowledge but a problem of power, it will not be solved through the kind of policy advocacy scholars are encouraged to undertake to demonstrate “research impact”.

KEYWORDS:

• White ignorance
• organisations
• counterterrorism
• prevent
• United Kingdom
• impact

Introduction

Central to the impetus behind this special issue are questions concerning the relationship of Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) to the state: how do states and the racial-colonial orders they uphold shape research agendas, and to what extent does this inhibit the production of knowledge for emancipatory ends? As pressure on social scientists to demonstrate policy impact increases, the ethics and efficacy of seeking “policy relevance” and engaging directly with state counterterrorism apparatuses are contested among CTS scholars. Some argue that counterterrorism’s inextricable links with coloniality and militarism render it unsalvageable, and reforming counterterrorism risks legitimising it and thereby extending its life (Jackson 2016) – a position broadly aligned with abolitionist approaches, including those explored in this issue (Husain 2020; Nguyen 2023; Khan, this issue; Schotten, this issue). Other scholars, while they acknowledge these risks, argue that engagement with counterterrorism policy and practice can successfully advance critical perspectives in these areas, and may be a moral imperative (Gunning 2007; McGowan 2016; Toros 2016). Toros (2016), for example, argues that state bureaucracies are not monolithic, and that “dialogue can also strengthen the moderates in violent states” (128). This article contributes to these debates by analysing the experiences of UK counterterrorism policymakers, some of whom might well be classed as moderates. Demonstrating how the influence of critical and anti-racist perspectives is stifled by racialised and gendered norms governing the circulation of knowledge in policymaking spaces, I argue that these norms result from counterterrorism’s function of preserving structural white supremacy.

Building on a growing literature exploring how the epistemological underpinnings of counterterrorism policies and practices are shaped by whiteness (e.g. Abu-Bakare 2020, 2022; Ali 2020; Danso and Aning 2022; Dixit 2022; Martini 2023; Meier 2020), the article adopts Charles W. Mills’s (2007) concept of white ignorance to understand how organisational cultures in UK government departments responsible for counterterrorism policymaking are constituted by active processes of unknowing about the racialised impacts of counterterrorism. In doing so, it demonstrates that knowledge about the racist and colonial foundations, logics and impacts of counterterrorism is not absent so much as actively resisted by policymakers through routinised everyday practices deeply embedded in their organisational cultures. While “organisation” refers to a formalised structure – in this case a government department – “organisational cultures” refers to formal or informal rules or behavioural norms which an organisation’s members are expected and incentivised to follow (Hatfield and Mills 2000). For UK counterterrorism policymakers who are themselves critical of (some) racist ideas and policies in counterterrorism, I argue that these ingrained practices make such critiques difficult to speak and difficult for their colleagues to competently hear. For academic and civil society critics of UK counterterrorism, the article underlines that, because the counterterrorism project’s preservation of racial-colonial hierarchies is maintained not by a lack of anti-racist knowledge but by the interest-motivated, systematic refusal of that knowledge, efforts to influence counterterrorism policymaking by sharing critical research findings misdiagnose the problem, and therefore fail to remedy it.

The article emerges from a larger study of gendered, racialised and classed organisational cultures in UK government departments responsible for national security policymaking, in which counterterrorism was a particular area of focus. I draw primarily on semi-structured interviews conducted from 2017–2018 with 26 civil servants who currently or previously worked on counterterrorism policy, and were based in the Home Office (8), Foreign and Commonwealth Office (11), Cabinet Office (3) or in cross-departmental roles (4) at the time of the interview.¹ Although interviewees came from a range of backgrounds, I particularly sought the views of officials from historically-excluded groups, such as women, people of colour and officials from working-class backgrounds, reasoning that those who did not conform to the white, middle-class, male “type” around which these organisations had formed may have developed insights into organisational norms as a result of their “outsider within” status (Collins 1986).² As Patricia Hill Collins (1986) argues with reference to Black feminists in white- and male-dominated academic disciplines, joining a community where one does not share similar prior socialisation with the majority of members often requires assimilating oneself into the dominant group’s ways of thinking and doing, while also “coping with, avoiding, subverting, and challenging” taken-for-granted assumptions that the marginal member may not share (S26). I found – like Puwar (2004) in her study of the UK Civil Service – that the whiteness, middle-classness and masculinity around which organisational norms were built were described most clearly by individuals who had undertaken this dual process of consciously acculturating to organisational norms while also navigating mismatches with them, and it is the words of these minoritised individuals that form the backbone of the article. Because there are proportionately few counterterrorism policymakers who are people of colour, I largely refrain from disclosing their specific ethnic or religious backgrounds. While I (and in some cases interviewees themselves) deem this necessary to maintain their anonymity, it has the regrettable effect of flattening what are in fact heterogenous experiences between, for example, Muslim and non-Muslim officials, or officials of Black African-Caribbean or South Asian heritage. I also conducted 16 hours of participant observation with counterterrorism officials in meetings about the relevance of gender, race and other equalities issues to counterterrorism policy and practice – a process which itself raised questions about the ethics and politics of researcher engagement with state security institutions, which I have discussed elsewhere (Wright 2023). Additionally, I shared my research findings with civil servants in 2023 through a written summary and presentations to Home Office and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) staff, and discussed them in eight further interviews, two of them with counterterrorism officials in the FCDO.³ All names have been replaced with pseudonyms.

I begin by setting out how the article draws on and contributes to the literature on counterterrorism as a racialised project based on practices of knowledge production that reproduce whiteness. I then outline the concept of white ignorance as a form of unknowing about racial domination reproduced through social structures and processes, and how this relates to the conceptualisation of organisation culture which the article mobilises. The main body of the article outlines eight practices which I identified through my observations of, and interviews with, UK counterterrorism officials as maintaining ignorance of the ways in which counterterrorism policies, and the Prevent programme in particular, enact racial subordination. Finally, I discuss the implications of my findings for anti-racist academics, NGOs and critically-oriented researchers considering the possibilities and risks of seeking policy impact in the counterterrorism domain.

Counterterrorism as racialised and racialising

The article builds on scholarship showing that race is constitutive of the conceptualisation and practice of national security in general, and counterterrorism in particular (Abu-Bakare 2020; Bhattacharyya 2008; Kundani 2014; Ramji-Nogales 2022). In Europe and its settler colonies, national security has been defined and practised as the protection of a “nation” characterised by a racially-hierarchised social, political and economic order, for example through practices of war-making, policing and bordering. Ideas and practices now understood as counterterrorism have a longer lineage in counterinsurgency operations once used to suppress uprisings against European colonial rule, including the combination of special legislation, surveillance, military and policing activities alongside pre-emptive measures such as propaganda and “re-education” to prevent and reverse “radicalisation” (Khalili 2013; Kundani 2014; Mogbolu, this issue). The concept of the “terrorist” is racialised and racialising: it has been deployed recurrently by states to delegitimise anti-racist, anti-colonial and Black liberation movements (Husain 2020; Meier 2022; Viana and dos Santos da Silva 2021), while the term’s repeated association with Muslims produces a “racialization of Muslimness” as violent and dangerous (Kundani 2014, 12). By presenting counterterrorism as a politically neutral response to acts of extreme and irrational violence without accounting for the role of Western states and their imperial histories in producing the political and economic conditions that gave rise to this violence, counterterrorism discourses serve to naturalise the global racial-colonial order and the use of state violence to maintain it (Husain 2020, 2021; Nguyen 2023; Sen 2022).

In the UK context, the “Prevent” pillar of the government’s counterterrorism strategy has been particularly heavily criticised as a racist project. Prevent aims to stop crimes before they take place, for example by removing “terrorist” materials shared online, using the media to counter “extremist” ideology, and counselling individuals deemed to be at risk of radicalisation (HM Government 2023). While it addresses various political groups and ideologies characterised as “extremism”, understood as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values” (HM Government 2015, 9), its primary focus is on what are rendered Islamic ideologies. Funding for Prevent activities was originally allocated to local authorities based on the size of their Muslim populations, and though no longer acknowledged by government, it appears this is still a key criteria (Holmwood and Aitlhadj 2022). Prevent’s community-based programmes have included: funding and platforming Muslim organisations that are less critical of government policies; trainings in mosques and Muslim supplementary schools; and outreach programmes for Muslim women and youth aimed at countering “radicalisation” and encouraging referrals to Channel, the programme which identifies individuals deemed susceptible to “extremism” and decides how to intervene. Since 2015, emphasis has shifted towards the Prevent Duty, which requires public sector organisations such as educational and healthcare bodies to looks for signs of “extremism” and refer individuals to Prevent accordingly. In the wider context of entrenched structural, institutional and ideological racism, the construction of “extremism” in opposition to liberal values understood as essentially British inevitably feeds into racist and anti-immigrant discourses and practices (Ali 2020; Skoczylis and Andrews 2019; Younis 2021).

As Ali (2020) explains, Prevent is not an otherwise benign safe-guarding programme of which acts of racism are an unfortunate side-effect; rather, racism and racialisation are constitutive of a project that constructs and defends a conceptualisation of white Britishness as inimical to and threatened by a racialised Muslimness. These arguments were underlined once again by the government’s appointment of William Shawcross to lead an independent review of the programme (henceforth the Shawcross Review), a man who had stated that “Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future. I think all European countries have vastly, very quickly growing Islamic populations” (Grierson and Dodd 2021). This appointment, and the review’s terms of reference – which excluded any effort to take seriously the critiques discussed here – contributed to the decision of hundreds of Muslim organisations, scholars and community organisers to boycott the review. As Qurashi (2021) explained: “Prevent’s harms must be addressed with a people’s commission – with a good number arguing that concerns can only be resolved by its abolition”.

A growing body of scholarship also addresses how practices of knowledge production surrounding counterterrorism are racialised. It explores how whiteness – understood here as “the processes of categorisation through which white power and white motivated self-interest circulate so as to reinforce themselves” (Bain 2018, 9) – shapes the logics determining which violence is understood as “terrorism”, what causes it and what are appropriate state responses (Abu-Bakare 2020, 2022; Ali 2020; Dixit 2022; Meier 2020). Themes recurring in this literature, and which I pick up on throughout the article, are the framing of logics conceived from a white epistemological standpoint as objective vis-à-vis the subjective experiences of racially-marked people who are subjected to counterterrorism measures, and the tendency of counterterrorism policymakers and practitioners to conceptualise racism in terms of individual acts of discrimination rather than as a structural phenomenon. For example, examining academic-practitioner knowledge exchanges in UK and Canadian counterterrorism, Abu-Bakare (2022) shows how only knowledges about race that reduce racism to individual discriminatory attitudes and elide counterterrorism’s imbrication with structural racism are permitted to influence policy discussions. In relation to Prevent, Ali (2020, 580) argues that the programme “relies on structures of white ignorance” – a concept I elaborate further in the next section – “to make secret its racial logics, and reproduces these structures through racialised bordering”. This article builds on and contributes to this literature by shedding light on the everyday ways in which whiteness is reproduced within counterterrorism policymaking in UK government departments. In the next section, I expand on the theoretical framework I adopt to do this work.

White ignorance and organisational culture

Charles W. Mills’s (2007) concept of white ignorance refers to a state of not-knowing about matters of race and racism that is actively reproduced by social processes and structures. He argues that the socially-mediated routes through which subjects produce knowledge, such as perception, conception, memory and testimony, are normatively practised in ways that produce false beliefs or an absence of true beliefs about the racial structuring of the world (C. W. Mills 2007, 2015). By enabling mischaracterisations of the racial status quo as one of equality, white ignorance sustains white supremacy: “it enables a self-representation in which differential white privilege, and the need to correct for it, does not exist” (C. W. Mills 2007, 31). Drawing on Marxist theorisations of ideology, Mills articulates a materialist account of white ignorance as resulting from a “political economy of racial domination” that requires “a corresponding cognitive economy” to sustain it (C. W. Mills 2015, 217). White ignorance is a function of white people’s material interest in not recognising the structural (political and economic) white supremacy from which they benefit (C. W. Mills 2007). Although it is people racialised as white who primarily manifest and benefit from it, because of its “impersonal social-structural causation” (C. W. Mills 2007, 21) people of colour can also manifest white ignorance: the concept is mobilised less to describe an attribute of individuals than to identify widespread and entrenched social processes that reproduce this ignorance. White ignorance endorses “an understanding about what counts as a correct, objective interpretation of the world, and for agreeing to this view, one is (‘contractually’) granted full cognitive standing in the polity, the official epistemic community”, yet this view represents an (often tacit) “agreement to misinterpret the world” (C. W. Mills 1997, 17–18). Individuals’ ignorance of structural racism is sometimes deliberately maintained out of a desire to maintain racial dominance, but need not be: because knowledge is suppressed or distorted by social processes, individuals may become ignorant whether or not they hold overtly racist beliefs (C. W. Mills 2007).

Because white ignorance is produced through social-structural processes, the concept lends itself well to the study of organisations or institutions as racialised constructs. In this article, I use “organisational culture” as a conceptual lens through which to understand how white ignorance is reproduced in counterterrorism policymaking spaces. Organisational culture has been variously understood to encompass norms, values, shared meanings, rules for or patterns of behaviour, symbols, rites and rituals, specialised language and discourses, socialisation processes or a combination of these (Aaltio and Mills 2002; Hatfield and Mills 2000; Hearn 2002; A. J. Mills 1988; Wilson 2001). I understand it here as a set of rules or behavioural norms which members are expected to follow, which may be enforced through formalised mechanisms or, more often in the case of norms identified in this article, regulated in more subtle ways, such as the attribution of credibility, and distribution of praise or opportunities (Hatfield and Mills 2000; A. J. Mills 1988). “Organisational culture” in the sociological literature maps closely onto the political science concept of “institutions”, typically characterised as formal or informal “rules of the game” that produce recurring patterns of behaviour, whose boundaries may or may not be contiguous with organisations (Chappell and Waylen 2013, 599; Krook and Mackay 2011, 1; Lowndes 2014, 686). Although “institution” is often used interchangeably with “organisation”, elsewhere it is understood so broadly that there is “no clear distinction between institutions and social norms in general” (Lowndes 2014, 685). To avoid ambiguity, I use “organisations” over “institutions”, while drawing insights from both literatures.

A range of literature demonstrates how organisational cultures can be racialised, including in how they regulate the allocation of material and social resources, or produce particular ways of thinking and speaking about race as the organisational norm (Ahmed 2012; Garbes 2021; Puwar 2004; Ray 2019). While individuals arrive at organisations with existing (though not fixed) attitudes and habitual practices concerning race and racism, organisations have their own norms and regulatory practices which then also shape behaviour through a process of acculturation (A. J. Mills 1988). Organisational cultures are performatively reproduced through the repetition of practices wherein individuals discipline themselves and each other to abide by these norms. The processes I describe in this article, through which white ignorance is produced and maintained in UK counterterrorism policymaking, may appear at first as individual speech acts or behaviours of particular officials. However, as demonstrated in the accounts given by interviewees and the recognition with which my findings have been met by officials, these represent routinised patterns of behaviour sedimented into organisational norms, and hold considerable power to discipline officials’ everyday practices.

Eight ways to maintain white ignorance: the case of Prevent

In this section, I outline eight practices that effect the suppression or rejection of testimony that would substantiate critiques of Prevent and wider counterterrorism policies as racist: framing accusations of racism as based on a misunderstanding; focusing on intentions over impacts; self-silencing; limiting what counts as evidence; framing critics as emotionally-oriented; decisions concerning who participates in these policy discussions in the first place; the compartmentalisation of conversations about racism; and more recent uses of the Civil Service Code to frame analyses of structural racism as too political for civil servants. Although each practice offers insights into counterterrorism’s imbrication with whiteness, my purpose is to argue that this pattern of ignorance-producing norms demonstrates a consistent organisational commitment to white ignorance based on material interests that is larger than any individual practice. I do not claim that all individuals discussed here manifest white ignorance themselves, in the sense of lacking knowledge about the racial ordering of the world; some clearly hold and desire to share this knowledge. Rather, each scenario describes practices for which the apparent outcome is to prevent recognition or uptake of this knowledge in policy discussions. Not every official quoted here worked on Prevent: they worked on various aspects of counterterrorism, and interview questions addressed their experiences in counterterrorism policymaking broadly. That most interviewees mentioned Prevent in response to questions about how organisational cultures are racialised reflects the programme’s inseparability in public discourse from questions of racism. Interviewees’ locations across the counterterrorism community, however, mean my findings reflect organisational discourses about Prevent broadly, and not necessarily the content of policy discussions among those working directly on Prevent.

Declaring a misunderstanding

During my field observations with counterterrorism officials, pre-emptive defences of Prevent as not-racist were usually framed around the idea that allegations of racism were based on misunderstandings. For example, during a conversation about how equalities legislation applies to counterterrorism activities, Rosalind, a white woman, argued that those who say Prevent is racist simply misunderstand the programme. She stated that Prevent is a safeguarding programme – similar to interventions around domestic violence, mental health or child protection – whose purpose is to keep vulnerable people safe from radicalisation (for discussion see Aked 2020; Heath-Kelly and Strausz 2019; Pettinger 2019). Rosalind argued that the government views people referred to Prevent not as suspects but as (potential) victims, a framing consistent with its messaging that a Channel referral is a “supportive process” and “not a sanction” (Aked 2020, 52). As Ali (2020) argues, framing Prevent as a safeguarding measure allows “the unseeing of racism embedded in ideas of radicalisation and extremism” (589). Indeed, racialised security practices have often been enmeshed with care and humanitarianism that functions to soothe white anxiety by ameliorating the most visible harms of white supremacy, securing whiteness by positioning it as benevolent (Pallister-Wilkins 2021).

So the logic goes, although Prevent focuses largely on Muslims, if the programme’s critics understood that it is supportive, not punitive, they would agree that it is not racist. Criticisms then become a public relations problem, which can be solved through better communication. Consider the following comments from two people of colour working in counterterrorism, who had heard criticisms of Prevent expressed by their friends and family:

But you hear the conversation [among friends and family members about Prevent] and they’re like, “Why is the government not doing this?” and you almost want to say “Actually, that’s not … ” But I don’t say anything because I know I shouldn’t, I can’t. And I’m thinking, well, if these groups of people are thinking that, then there must be lots of people around the country who think that. Why is government not doing more to either make it very clear what this policy is about, what they’re trying to achieve with the policy, and how they can get involved in the policy?

[W]hen you look at Prevent or Channel, these programmes are regarded as poisonous in the Islamic community because [they think] it’s the white man telling a Muslim mum to police their children. That’s fundamentally wrong on a lot of levels, but that is the perception. But I think the whiteness of the Civil Service, […] particularly national security, means that we miss out on ever such a lot of talent and diverse thought that’s needed to create good policy that will challenge a lot of these falsehoods or these false perspectives that a lot of people in the general public hold on counterterrorism strategy.

Like Rosalind, both officials frame criticisms of Prevent as exhibiting a lack of understanding, albeit one caused by the government’s ineffective communication. The second official names the whiteness of the Civil Service as a barrier to creating “good policy”, yet still argues that the benefit of including the perspectives of people of colour is to “challenge falsehoods” held by the public – i.e. to communicate better about the policy, rather than to change it. A similar framing appears in the Shawcross Review’s terms of reference, which requested input on “how to respond to criticisms and complaints” rather than how to substantively address them (Home Office 2021).

These arguments make a discursive move with a long history in deflecting conversations about racism: these officials frame critics of Prevent – largely Muslims and/or people of colour or those proximate to them as service providers (e.g. Abbas and Siddique 2012; Aked 2020; Mcdonald 2011; Miah 2013; Qurashi 2018; Younis and Jadhav 2019, 2020) – as inexpert and lacking relevant facts, while policymakers – most racialised as white – assume a “big picture” view, which is more complete. Rosalind and her colleagues did not (and likely would not) explicitly invoke their own racial identities or those of their critics to explain their claim that the latter simply do not understand. However, their arguments derive force from a history of racialising discourses constructing the knowledge of white people as objective and detached, and that of people of colour as biased or anecdotal, particularly on questions of race (Puwar 2004; Smith 2010; Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). The discursive association of whiteness with objectivity thereby enables the assertion of “not-racism” by officials racialised as white to appear as neutral, “big picture” thinking. By thinking from the lives of those who experience racism, critics show how Prevent functions as a vector of that oppression (e.g. Abbas and Siddique 2012; Jarvis and Lister 2013; Martuja and Tufail 2017; Miah 2013; Open Society Justice Initiative 2016; Taylor and Soni 2017), yet their perspectives are deemed partial because they do not accept the government’s characterisation of Prevent as a benign safeguarding programme. Some officials acknowledged that their own perspectives on counterterrorism were incomplete: for example, Francesca, a white woman, argued that “a bunch of white people sitting in a room” inevitably lacked relevant knowledge that would be available to someone who grew up in the Muslim faith. However, these acknowledgements did not extend to recognising that partial perspectives conceived from a white standpoint may produce a different – and deficient – understanding of what racism is and how it functions. By refusing to regard Prevent’s critics as credible knowers, officials effect a kind of testimonial quieting (Dotson 2011) that prevents their analyses of racism from being heard.

Proclaiming good intentions

Second, by orienting their rebuttals around framing Prevent as a safeguarding policy, or articulating its problems as resulting from a failure to “make it very clear […] what they are trying to achieve with the policy”, officials engage a conceptualisation of racism as characterised by ill intentions. As Lentin explains, arguments that a practice is “not racism” contain a “determination to control the definition of racism itself”, often by asserting a conceptualisation of racism as “a question of individual morality, rather than being structurally engendered” (2018, 402; 2020, 63). While some critics may argue that Prevent has malign intentions, most emphasise how it functions in practice to reinforce structural exclusions and inequalities (e.g. Aked 2020; Winter et al. 2022; Younis and Jadhav 2019, 2020). Yet the argument that it is designed to safeguard the vulnerable – that its intentions are not discriminatory towards Muslims – is offered as evidence that Prevent cannot be racist. Again, focusing on the apparent good intentions of white people and organisations has a long history as a move that (intentionally or otherwise) deflects attention from discussions of racism as a structuring feature of societies, repositioning white people as victims of a misunderstanding or unjust accusation (Frankenberg 1993; Lentin 2018; Wekker 2016). As Wekker (2016) argues, such moves to innocence enact a form of white ignorance, protecting white people from knowledge of the workings of racism and its effects on racially-marked subjects.

Although defensive responses to people highlighting the racist impact of one’s actions are sometimes attributed to white people’s socialisation into a white habitus (Bonilla-Silva 2006), this is not all that is going on here. The two quotations above, which dismiss critiques of Prevent as “false perspectives”, came from people of colour. Rather, because white ignorance is produced through the social and structural suppression of knowledge (C. W. Mills 2007), this framing of racism as individual discriminatory attitudes rather than an outcome of social structures is continually reinforced by wider societal discourses about race, but also part of the organisational script to which civil servants are socialised to adhere. “Official” anti-racisms adopted by the UK government and have enacted a liberal co-optation of more radical versions, omitting any recognition of racial capitalism and its roots in colonial histories, and focusing instead on individual prejudice and unconscious bias (Sivanandan 1985, Shafi and Nagdee, 2022; Elliott-Cooper 2023). Parallels can be found in immigration policy, where an independent review found that staff in the Home Office – which also holds primary responsibility for Prevent – held a “misconception that racism is confined to decisions made with racist motivations” and did not track “the racial impact of its policies and decisions” (Williams 2020, 114, 149). This liberal anti-racism is so pervasive that Fekete (2020) argues it should be understood “as less of a narrative and more as a system of denial that appears to be hardwired into the government’s way of thinking on race” (91). Correspondingly, the continuous disciplining of subjects through the internalisation of organisational norms in government departments encourages officials of all racial backgrounds to adopt a habitus that reproduces white ignorance. As Ahmed (2012) explains, “If whiteness is what the institution is oriented around, then even bodies that do not appear white still have to inhabit whiteness” (41). At an organisational level, the repetition of such arguments appears to sediment them into a feature of organisational culture that is continually reproduced.

Self-silencing

This disciplining of subjects occurs in part through the third practice I identify as sustaining white ignorance: that of self-silencing, in which officials decline to speak about the racist impacts of counterterrorism because they perceive that their colleagues are not willing or able to hear what they have to say. Although an act of self-disciplining, this is nonetheless a form of coercive silencing, enacted by the listener’s prior behaviours demonstrating a lack of competence to hear the speaker’s testimony (Dotson 2011). In a parallel with Younis and Jadhav’s (2019) research with healthcare workers tasked with implementing Prevent, people of colour in particular – Muslim and non-Muslim – self-silenced out of fear of how colleagues would perceive them if they spoke up. Nadia, a woman of colour, told me that she found aspects of Prevent “a bit offensive and not thought-through, and [a] very white, privileged, colonial almost, view” but felt unable to voice this opinion at work. When asked how her colleagues might respond, she answered:

I think they would have been really offended, and probably assumed that I’m thinking they’re racist, when it’s not … I’m not saying you’re racist, I’m saying you can miss out on a lot by not getting those views and understanding what it’s like to be a young Muslim in this country.

This explanation highlights the effects (and perhaps prevalence) of individualising understandings of racism: Nadia anticipates her colleagues assuming she is “thinking they’re racist” as individuals. Her actual claim – that Prevent takes a “very white, privileged, colonial almost, view” because it fails to think from the lives of young Muslims – cannot be fully comprehended if read through an understanding of racism as individual prejudice rather than social structure (see Abu-Bakare 2020). This can be read as an instance of hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2007) in which the dominance of social understandings reflecting the interests of the powerful – in this case, official anti-racisms based in whiteness that deflect from or deny structural racism – result in Nadia’s colleagues lacking the hermeneutical resources to understand her critique. Anticipating that her ideas will not be heard, she strategically opts to self-silence.

Reluctance to name racism is a common feature of predominantly white organisations (Ahmed 2012; Puwar 2004), and Ahmed (2012) documents how organisations often treat those who speak about racism as becoming a problem themselves, including by reframing discussions of institutional racism as an attack on individuals and their intentions. Such practices reproduce white ignorance by demonstrating that “to use the language of racism is to risk not being heard” or worse, to be reframed as the problem (Ahmed 2012, 156). Indeed, Prevent has a communications strategy specifically to “counter extremists’ false characterisation of the UK as being a place where Muslims are oppressed” (HM Government 2006, 16). Although no interviewee expressed this fear directly, to acknowledge the oppression of Muslims might therefore risk oneself being accused of perpetuating an extremist narrative.

Again echoing Younis and Jadhav’s (2019) findings among healthcare workers, one official explained that other people of colour in their workplace advised them to self-silence:

So if you raise a challenge to a policy based on your background, your ethnicity, for example, you’ll actually get a lot of people from your ethnic background saying, “Shhh, don’t raise that. Don’t draw attention to it. Don’t draw attention to how different you are, just go along with it.” Which is negative, but actually it comes from this [idea that], “If you work hard, keep your nose down, head down, that would be enough to get you through. And if you’re lucky you’ll progress, but just keep your head down and do the job, go home. Don’t bring race into it, don’t bring faith into it, because you’ll draw attention, you’ll make mountains out of molehills.” I get told this regularly, “Don’t bring up race, it’s not an issue.”

This official’s experience demonstrates how white people’s responses to people of colour who speak about racism can engender routinised social practices of self-silencing, that function to protect whiteness from any acknowledgement of the racial ordering of the world.

Limiting what counts as evidence

The same official’s subsequent comments highlight the fourth practice I identify as sustaining white ignorance – that of setting unreasonable standards for what counts as evidence. The interviewee continued:

The flip side of that is when you do bring up the challenge, and it’s not necessarily always unhealthy, but the challenge [in response] can be, “Right, prove it. Show me your evidence base for me. Show me this”.

Noting that, once again, the rebuttal to a suggestion that racism is at play is a demand for evidence, I asked whether the fact that this official was speaking from personal experience enhanced or undermined their authority on this subject in the eyes of other officials. They replied:

At the risk of bringing in every Black and Asian minority ethnic civil servant to talk about their challenges or their lived experiences, I suppose the other difficult thing about lived experiences is that they’re difficult to measure. We can’t make a nice quantitative chart on lived experiences, unfortunately.

This demand for quantitative evidence as a supposedly more “solid” form of proof invokes discourses constructing quantitative data as a “hard” a form of evidence, bearing the masculine- and white-coded qualities of objectivity and emotional detachment (Swan 2010). Those highlighting inequalities often deploy quantitative data strategically because they “cannot afford to be seen as soft, and hence having less value for the organisation” (Ahmed 2012, 75). Lived experiences of racism, because they are difficult to quantify and inseparable from personal investments and emotional orientations, do not confer the epistemic authority needed to be heard in this space. This is not true of all lived experiences: interviewees told me that the experiences of officials who had served in intelligence agencies or the military gave them epistemic authority in the eyes of their peers. Whereas their experiences appealed to a notion of masculine worldliness valued by their organisations, people of colour’s experiences of moving through the world as racially-marked subjects apparently lacked similar appeal. Indeed, because objectivity has been historically discursively associated with masculinity and whiteness (Chappell 2002; Puwar 2004; Walters 1987), there may be extra pressure on women and people of colour to present critiques with “hard data”, or else refrain from making them at all. Conversely, comprehending how counterterrorism policies reproduce racism requires different theoretical lenses: quantitative data, though it may helpfully illustrate the point, cannot effect such a reconceptualisation without an accompanying understanding of racism as structural – one that colleagues often lack the hermeneutical resources to comprehend, or else actively deny. Therefore, to require officials to produce numbers that somehow “prove” that counterterrorism policies are racist is to set a standard of evidence that cannot be met.

Even when presented quantitatively, experiences of (predominantly Muslim) people of colour affected by Prevent have been routinely discounted as credible evidence. For example, the government claimed there is “no evidence” of Prevent policing negatively impacting relations between Muslims and the police (HM Government 2011, 11), based on a perceptions study (Innes et al. 2011). The study finds that, while overall perceptions of police among Muslims are positive, they are negative among more than half of young Muslim men, who also experience more police contact than other groups. It concludes that young men’s perceptions “may […] be an effect of the focus of much Prevent policing and also street-policing in general” (Innes et al. 2011, 75). Similarly, Muslim women over the age of 45 had more negative perceptions of the police than other groups, which is attributed to their “experiencing policing through the accounts of their sons” and being “susceptible to their views being negatively influenced by the stories they are told” (Innes et al. 2011, 7). Downplaying the experiences of young Muslim men as mere “stories”, the report implicitly questions the validity of their testimony and doubts mothers’ capacity to rationally assess that testimony by framing them as susceptible to negative influence. The government’s interpretation of these findings goes even further, declaring that this testimony is not evidence of any negative impacts of Prevent policing at all. Similarly, in 2019, security minister Ben Wallace challenged the epistemic foundations on which critiques of Prevent are based when announcing what became the Shawcross Review, stating: “This review should expect those critics of Prevent, who often use distortions and spin, to produce solid evidence of their allegations” (Home Office 2019). Lord Carlile, who was originally appointed to lead the process, stated that the review “was completely unnecessary, based on fictitious or a complete lack of evidence” and critiques of Prevent were “absolute nonsense” (Dearden 2019). Since these critiques often rely on the testimony of people subject to Prevent measures (e.g. Abbas and Siddique 2012; Brown and Saeed 2015; Jarvis and Lister 2013; Martuja and Tufail 2017; Miah 2013; National Union of Students 2018; Open Society Justice Initiative 2016), it is strongly implied that their analysis of their experiences is not credible evidence. These statements exemplify a racialised practice that Mills identifies as reproducing white ignorance, in which “one group […] of potential witnesses is discredited in advance as being epistemically suspect” such that “testimony from the group will tend to be dismissed or never solicited to begin with” (2007, 31).

Framing critics as emotionally-oriented

Perhaps linked to this demand for critique to be presented in way that can be read as objective, at times it is rebutted in ways that frame these critiques as taking an emotional orientation, drawing on racist and sexist tropes. For example, multiple British Asian women told me they experienced an expectation that they would conform to a stereotype of Asian women as submissive, or “studious and quiet and hardworking”, as one interviewee put it. When they challenged the views of their white and/or male peers they defied this expectation, as one woman explained:

I don’t know whether that’s particularly in the counterterrorism space [or] more generally, but men in particular from a certain class are taken more seriously than women from a different class to them or different ethnicity. Sadly, to me it does seem as though that’s the case because it’s just happened to me too many times for it to be a coincidence. And sometimes I do wonder whether that’s because people have assumptions or stereotypes about the way that women from ethnic minority backgrounds should act. And I’ve found when I’ve been quite vocal — not vocal to be honest with you, I’ve just been normal and I’ve just been doing my job — people have said that I’m … what’s the word, feisty? That I’m quite feisty or that I’m very opinionated.

The term “feisty” is typically applied to those perceived as diminutive, who are exercising force or aggression beyond that predicted by their size or status. Its application to this official therefore implies that her directness is unexpected or out of place. It recalls the racist and sexist stereotype of the “angry woman of colour” (Ahmed 2018, 338), which portrays assertiveness as touchiness unwarranted by the situation, unnecessarily rocking the boat. While interviewees told me that the unemotive habitus expected of the bureaucrat – discursively associated with middle- or upper-class, white masculinity – is read as demonstrating objectivity (Wright forthcoming), “feistiness” would seem to signal the opposite. This official’s being labelled as “opinionated” similarly suggests her viewpoint results from personal bias rather than “objective” evidence. She did not specify what she was being “vocal” about in this case, but one can see how the risk of being read as biased and emotionally-oriented would provide a powerful disincentive for people of colour within the counterterrorism community to raise critiques invoking race. This does not imply that white people critiquing racist counterterrorism policies would necessarily be listened to: during period of my participant observation, I, a white woman, highlighted research indicating that Prevent may increase Islamophobic attitudes, harassment and violence, which was roundly dismissed. However, for officials of colour to raise such critiques, particularly by invoking personal experiences as racially-marked subjects, foregrounds their otherness in ways they fear will damage their image as credible securocrats. In other contexts, the fear of reinforcing such stereotypes has been shown to contribute to self-silencing (Jones 2023; Younis and Jadhav 2019).

Promoting ‘friendly’ voices

Sixth, white ignorance is reproduced in counterterrorism policy discussions through decisions about who participates in these conversations in the first place: organisational decisions about hiring and promotion, or individuals’ decisions about whether to apply to work in counterterrorism. As Dana, a woman of colour, explained, expressing “friendly” opinions is a condition of – or at least more conducive to – recruitment and advancement within the counterterrorism community:

I feel as though what’s happening now is, “Okay, let’s recruit more ethnic minorities or more women”. Okay, you’ve recruited them but they’re all quite posh really. You just think, “You’ve just recruited people who are just like you. They’re just [a] different skin colour or different gender”. […] There are some people in senior positions from an ethnic minority or Muslim background. But those people tend to be, as I said before, like everyone else. I find that people are recruited if they’re friendly or they have opinions that seniors like and want to hear. And, perhaps because of that, there’s a lack of maybe understanding about how deep this anti-Prevent sentiment runs.

Describing the reproduction of whiteness in feminist theory, Crenshaw (1989) argues that “[t]he authoritative universal voice – usually white male subjectivity masquerading as non-racial, non-gendered objectivity – is merely transferred to those who, but for gender, share many of the same cultural, economic and social characteristics” (154). Dana’s comments suggest that in counterterrorism policymaking, people of colour – many of whom, but for race and sometimes religion, share the economic and social characteristics of their peers – are conditionally accepted as speaking with this authoritative universal voice, provided they are not speaking about the racist impacts of counterterrorism. This would seem a clear example of Mills’s (1997) edict that, under the racial contract, agreeing to a view of the world that obfuscates its racial structuring is a condition of gaining full standing in the official epistemic community. Consequently, those who do not share “opinions that seniors like” on Prevent tend to self-select out of jobs pertaining to it. Ethical objections are a major reason why many working in government, and especially people of colour, choose not to work in national security, and counterterrorism specifically. As Vanessa, a white woman, put it:

[P]eople will refuse to come and work [in counterterrorism] because they don’t agree with Prevent. I’ve got Muslim friends who’ve done that: “I like [this team] but I don’t agree with Prevent, so I’m leaving”. So that is our, I think, probably biggest recruiting barrier is that people just don’t agree with what we’re doing. And we’ve got limited ability to change that.

Given the foregoing critiques of counterterrorism, to say that the relative paucity of people in counterterrorism policymaking who are critical of its racialised practices contributes to maintaining white ignorance is not to critique their decisions to opt out. Because the possibilities for challenging policy are restricted by the subordinate position of civil servants vis-à-vis ministers, and disciplining practices like those identified here, withdrawal of one’s labour may sometimes be the only meaningful form of resistance available within the organisation. In immigration policy, where more open disputes have erupted between officials and ministers over racist anti-immigration laws, a labour union representing Home Office staff has launched legal challenges and threatened strike action over policies that could breach international law (Dearden 2023). Although Amnesty International UK (2023) has concluded that Prevent does not comply with international human rights law, there does not so far appear to be similar organising among counterterrorism officials, perhaps in part because those uncomfortable with the policy have already chosen not to work on it, while the periodic security vetting that many jobs in counterterrorism require monitors political activity to ascertain trustworthiness.

The fact that performing whiteness in ways described here, including accepting the counterterrorism paradigm largely as given, is a condition of working in counterterrorism policymaking not only reproduces white ignorance in this space, but illustrates how deeply enmeshed counterterrorism is with the reproduction of whiteness. The adeptness with which these mechanisms weed out dissent reflects a Civil Service culture favouring brevity, efficiency and problem-solving over critical theorising (Cox 1981), but also the fragility of hegemonic conceptualisations of counterterrorism as a security practice. The very construction of counterterrorism as a defensive response to irrational acts of violence requires ignorance of the political conditions and imperial histories from which such violence emerges; to expose these is to unravel counterterrorism’s central justifying logics, and therefore must be continually resisted for policymaking to proceed as normal.

Compartmentalising conversations about race

Seventh, while spaces have increasingly been created within the national security community in recent years for discussing issues of racism, these tend to be siloed off from policy discussions, which are governed by a different set of norms. When I presented my research findings to groups of officials in the Home Office and FCDO – including many of the above arguments about organisational resistance to speaking about racism – the reception was broadly positive, perhaps in part because attendees were self-selecting individuals already somewhat sympathetic to the issues raised. My positionality as a white woman likely also afforded me more leeway to critique the racialised cultures of these departments than many of the people of colour I interviewed. Although officials attending these events were no doubt careful in their wording, they shared their frustrations about their workplace cultures, with many women and people of colour expressing relief at hearing their experiences reflected back. In further interviews conducted in 2023, I learned that opportunities for similar conversations had increased since the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests. I heard of, for example, regular “tea and chat” sessions held by some teams to share their feelings about the movement; events organised by staff race and equality networks about inequalities within government departments; informal reading groups on racism in Britain; and formal learning sessions on British colonialism and its present-day impacts. However, most interviewees felt that these conversations about racism had not filtered through into policy discussions, creating what one interviewee described as “an institutional compartmentalising of things”.

These meetings and events had some positive impacts: interviewees reported that they had helped them to maintain their mental health and wellbeing during stressful events, and that speaking about racism and colonialism in those spaces had emboldened them to start more conversations with their colleagues about these issues. However, given that this openness to discussing racism was thus far, as one interviewee put it, “far more about […] the capability and wellbeing of the workforce rather than the policy”, the events seem to also function as a kind of pressure valve. While offering a “safe space” for marginalised individuals to speak about racism without repercussions, they also insulate the normal functioning of the institution from the implications of bringing those conversations into their daily work. That is, dedicated spaces enable staff to feel heard and air grievances about racism in society or within departments without requiring the latter to reckon with how security policy – including counterterrorism policy – reproduces structural racism. This may help to preserve formal policy discussions as spaces still governed by norms of whiteness that appear to foreclose any such serious reckoning.

Declaring structural racism ‘too political’

If the preceding examples of practices that reproduce white ignorance are enacted with more or less intentionality in different situations, the eighth example represents an overt, deliberate effort by ministers to exclude analyses of structural racism from policy discussions. This has encompassed, for example, denunciations of critical race theory, which then-Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch described as “political” and “getting into [public] institutions that really should be neutral” (Nelson 2020). This rhetoric has entered official documents, such as the government’s 2022 Inclusive Britain report, which commits public sector institutions to ensuring that language on matters of race “seeks to encourage unity and inclusion, rather than division and grievance” and demonstrates a “careful delineation of ideas and views which are more political” because “it is never appropriate to promote political ideas or groupings, or communicate in divisive language which singles out any community in a negative way, in a public sector environment” (HM Government 2022, 87). Interviewees confirmed that they understood its message – alongside ministerial rhetoric about purging so-called “woke ideology” from the Civil Service – as forbidding references to structural inequalities in their work, including concepts such as white privilege, intersectionality and coloniality. These pronouncements reinterpret civil servants’ codified obligation to be politically impartial by casting any argument contradicting the government’s denials about structural racism in Britain as too political for civil servants. Although unclear how this will be enforced, several interviewees reported that this language made them rethink how they expressed themselves on matters of race and inequalities more broadly – perhaps especially in the Home Office, where ministers have been particularly vocal on these matters.

These eight practices do not represent an exhaustive list of ways in which knowledge about the racial structuring of the world is refused in UK counterterrorism policymaking spaces. Other arguments I heard from participants, such as the refrain that Prevent cannot be racist because it targets white supremacist ideologies as well as those rendered as Islamist ones, have been discussed elsewhere (Ali 2020; Winter et al. 2022; Younis and Jadhav 2020), and there are undoubtedly more practices not yet documented. Together, however, they illuminate a variety of mechanisms that deter officials from offering analysis of Prevent’s (and UK counterterrorism’s) reproduction of structural racism and prevent such analysis being competently heard. Although Home Office officials were perhaps more likely to defend Prevent in interviews with me, ignorance-maintaining practices were reported (and sometimes enacted) in similar ways by officials from across departments, suggesting commonalities that are unsurprising given high levels of interdepartmental working in counterterrorism policymaking. While it is difficult to tell how widespread these practices are, and impossible to extrapolate conclusions about whole organisations from a small number of interviews, officials – especially those of colour – describe them as deeply ingrained within parts of each department working on counterterrorism, such that these officials routinely discipline their own behaviour in response.

These practices may appear as problems of individual attitudes if read through the liberal anti-racisms critiqued above, and one can imagine, for example, anti-racism trainings changing some of the more overtly discriminatory ones. However, if, as in structural accounts of racism, individual prejudice is “one of the outcomes of a racist system of exploitation and control, historically constituted by colonialism” (Elliott-Cooper 2023, 107), such solutions will change how racism manifests rather than abolishing it. Put differently, if white ignorance is required to maintain consent for a racial-capitalist order, new ways of refusing knowledge about structural racism will likely replace no-longer-tenable ones, as the recent crackdown by ministers evidences. This is not a deterministic view: white ignorance is “not insuperable” (C. W. Mills 2007, 23) and states are not monoliths entirely reducible to singular class interests, but neither are they neutral entities (Akbar 2023). Given counterterrorism’s symbiotic relationship with structural white supremacy, I suggest the counterterrorism community itself is unlikely to emerge as the locus of change. In the concluding section, I discuss implications for scholarly and activist engagement with counterterrorism policymaking.

Conclusions

Some CTS scholars, I noted earlier, argue that it is necessary for critical scholars and activists to engage with state counterterrorism policymakers to seek reforms to colonial policies and practices (Gunning 2007; McGowan 2016; Toros 2016). They argue that states are not monolithic entities; that some individuals within counterterrorism structures share critical perspectives, and can be empowered through the dissemination of academic knowledge supporting their critical positions. By examining the experiences of counterterrorism policymakers in UK government departments, this article contributes an analysis of how organisational cultures rooted in whiteness make it challenging for officials troubled by the racialised logics and impacts of counterterrorism to get these critiques taken seriously. My findings concur with sceptics of “policy relevance” in CTS who argue that oppressive policies are not reformed by the sharing of critical research because this knowledge is not merely lacking in policy discussions but actively suppressed, refused or ignored (Abu-Bakare 2022; Jackson 2016). In short: the persistence of colonial and racist counterterrorism practices will not be resolved by sharing critical knowledge with policymakers because it is not, at its heart, a problem of knowledge, but a problem of power.⁴ If white ignorance results from white interests in maintaining structural white supremacy, presenting new knowledge is insufficient to overcome those investments, particularly for “the coercive arms of the state”, which “need to be seen as in part the enforcers of the Racial Contract” (C. W. Mills 1997, 84).

Jackson (2016) argues that, in the context of counterterrorism, “there is little point in speaking truth to power, because the powerful already know the truth and they don’t want to hear it” (124). My account of organisational cultures’ reproduction of white ignorance supports, but also complicates this view. Some of the powerful in UK counterterrorism policymaking, particularly at ministerial level, recognise the threat structural analyses of racism pose to the racial status quo that counterterrorism policies maintain, and are deliberately working to render them unspeakable in policy discussions. Others, including at the official level, are more-or-less insulated from knowledge about the racism of counterterrorism by organisational practices and discourses that routinely refuse this knowledge – practices to which officials are disciplined, and discipline each other, to adhere. Others still are struggling to make at least some truths about the racialised impacts and logics of counterterrorism heard, frustrated by these knowledge-obstructing practices.

I have also shown how these experiences are shaped by individuals’ positionalities along lines of race and gender. People of colour are conditionally accepted and protected by these organisations centred around whiteness provided that they (often tacitly) endorse an interpretation of the world that does not recognise security practices as structured by or upholding white domination. While anyone not endorsing this view will struggle to be taken seriously in counterterrorism policymaking, people of colour who critique policies as racist or colonial risk being framed as partial, making personal accusations, being too political for civil servants or, perhaps especially for women of colour, emotionally-oriented or opinionated. While official anti-racisms sometimes offer workplace diversity as a remedy to policymaking that reproduces racism and other inequalities, or even as evidence that racism has been overcome, these experiences highlight the limits of such an analysis.

For academics and activists engaging with policymakers, tempering one’s message is often the price of being received as a credible interlocutor (Enloe 2010; Toros 2016). In my own experience working with UK counterterrorism policymakers to facilitate access for my research, although I was able to raise critiques of Prevent’s Islamophobia, there were many more occasions where I held back my criticisms or reframed them in more palatable language for fear of losing research access (Wright 2023). The organisational norms I have described here as deterring structural analyses of racism demonstrate how and why, as Abu-Bakare (2020) explains, “It is a challenge to keep the attention of those who implement counterterrorism but in a way that does not give into neoliberal understandings of race or succumb to white logics of state-approved anti-racist discourse” (94). In other words, a more likely outcome than CTS researchers transforming counterterrorism policy through advocacy is that the impact imperative transforms the research, or the advocacy messages drawn from it, into something closer to what policymakers are able to hear (Gani and Marshall 2022).

While my findings lend support to calls for an abolitionist approach to the terrorism industry rather than a reformist one (Husain 2020; Nguyen 2023; Khan, this issue; Schotten, this issue), there may still be scope for CTS scholarship to help reduce the harms caused by counterterrorism in the short-to-medium term. Just as police, prison and border abolitionists support “non-reformist reforms” that advance abolitionist ends by reducing the power and reach of those institutions into the lives of communities (Akbar 2023; Bradley and de Noronha 2022; Gilmore 2007), future CTS research might explore what non-reformist reforms could entail in the context of counterterrorism (see also Muslim Abolitionist Futures 2021). Rather than persuading policymakers through elite advocacy, non-reformist reforms are characterised by building popular coalitions to shift the balance of power within society and demand solutions that challenge the logic of existing systems and better meet human needs (Akbar 2023). Alternatives to advocacy are already being practised: the boycott of the Shawcross Review by community organisations, academics and activists manifested a collective movement to withdraw consent from the review, undermining its legitimacy and changing the public conversation around it. Eschewing modes of advocacy that often constitute research impact activities therefore need not mean abandoning the possibility of advancing social change. On the contrary, exploring alternative approaches may reveal opportunities for contributing to emancipatory praxis that traditional policy advocacy – faced with the active refusal of knowledge about the racialised and racialising character of counterterrorism – has struggled to attain.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my research participants for their time and candour; Laleh Khalili, Marsha Henry, Nivi Manchanda and Victoria Basham for their feedback on previous versions of the text; Rabea Khan, Sarah Gharib Seif and the participants of the ‘Contesting Global Sites of Power and Knowledge Production’ workshop for their invaluable input; and the two anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions greatly strengthened the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council under [Grants ES/J500070/1 and ES/X007480/1].

Notes on contributors

Hannah Wright

Hannah Wright is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. Her research explores relationships among gender, race, class, militarism and coloniality in UK security policies and practices.

Notes

1. This research was approved by the London School of Economics Research Ethics Committee (ref 000762) and the Queen Mary University of London Ethics of Research Committee (ref QMERC23.026).

2. The 28 current or former counterterrorism officials interviewed included 5 women of colour, 3 men of colour, 12 white women and 8 white men, reflecting the whiteness of the counterterrorism community and perhaps greater reluctance among some people of colour to be interviewed.

3. In 2020, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office merged with the Department for International Development to form the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

4. I would like to thank Heike Schotten for articulating my argument back to me in this way.