Megan Salter

Aims and Purposes:

1. To explore and develop the concept of an agonistic
2. To understand what constitutes a set of institutional practices and the implications they have for enabling/constraining agonism.
3. To examine how a set of institutional counterterrorism practices enable/constrain the transformation of political relationships from those of antagonism to agonism, safeguarding of differences, and the limits of pluralism.
4. To draw upon Critical Terrorism Studies to identify how a set of practices and institutions can ensure diverse opinions are encountered rather than countered.

Research Overview

The research is concerned with the polarisation of political debates that can lead to terrorism, and it adopts agonism as its conceptual frame.

The seminal text is Chantal Mouffe’s On the Political (2011). Mouffe defines agonism as a we/they relation whereby the conflicting parties acknowledge that there is no rational solution to the conflict, but still recognise the legitimacy of the opponent. Mouffe makes a distinction between ‘politics’, whereby she means the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, and ‘the political’ meaning the dimension of antagonism which is constitutive of human societies, often characterised by power and conflict which reveals the limit of any rational consensus. Mouffe suggests that antagonistic conflicts are less likely to emerge so long as agonistic political channels for dissenting voices exist. She therefore does not treat polarisation (we/they distinction) as a problem to overcome, but rather something constitutive of human societies. Difference, and the contestation it produces, is the essence of healthy democratic debate. To seek consensual solutions masks hegemonic power.

To gain a deeper understanding of how agonism can be linked to contestation, the project utilises Antje Wiener’s Contestation and Constitution of Norms in Global IR (2018). Wiener’s argument focuses around ‘contestedness’ as a concept for global norm conflicts, and then links local contestations with the constitution of global norms. Through highlighting that principled academic intervention has been practised as ‘staging global multilogues’, Wiener suggests that this intervention identifies conflicts about norms, and examines where affected stakeholders engage in contestation under unequal conditions. The space for public engagement, she claims, while giving stakeholders a global stage where their discursive input in global normative change is made visible, is ultimately constrained by unequal access to contestation. What is most pivotal about Weiner’s work for this PhD project, is how a set of institutional practices establishing these “participatory spaces” for debate, enable/constrain the participants.

Participatory spaces can be understood to exist where the ‘state reaches out to additional actors within its citizenry to cope with a range of contemporary social problems’ (Collins & Bon Tai Soon, 2022, p.361). This space for contestation is not neutral and what is considered permissible can differ. Particularly, an interaction between state and non-state actors highlights how power can determine what is considered ‘acceptable practises’ within the space. To expose power differentials, I will engage with the Critical Terrorism literature. This literature exposes several underlying assumptions about how terrorism is framed and how these assumptions can negate effective engagement by law enforcement. Kieran Ford’s work on ‘A Pacifist Approach to Countering Extremism’ (2020) for example, suggests that to promote peace, pacifists must contribute to the reconceptualisation of extremism and that agonistic spaces are required to ensure “extremism” is contested within Mouffe’s “politics”; to encounter rather than counter.

The empirical application is the UK’s counterterrorism Prevent Strategy with the focus on how law enforcement engages, or encounters, communities susceptible to extremism. Prevent is a component of the UK’s CONTEST counterterrorism strategy. It has three objectives: (1) respond to the ideological challenge; (2) prevent people from being drawn into terrorism; (3) work with sectors and institutions where there are risks of radicalisation (HM Government, 2011). This PhD project is concerned with (3) and assessing the set of practices that inform how the participatory spaces established by the UK government enable/constrain an agonistic approach to managing radicalisation and extremism. It will endeavour to contest this strategic approach to ensure that effective partnerships and governance structures are in place to enable an effective agonistic participatory space.