EXPERT SARA SILVESTRI COMMENTS ON THE OSLO ATTACKS
by Sara Silvestri
In response to the terrible terrorist attacks in Oslo, yesterday David Cameron called for a review of the Government’s ‘Prevent’ counter-terrorism strategy.
Dr Sara Silvestri, Senior Lecturer in International Politics at City University London says:
“Groups and individuals like Anders Behring Breivik and his friends have gone un-checked because of flawed security policies.
Policies targeted at specific ‘problem communities’, such as the Contest/Prevent strategy in the UK, have created fractures in societal relations, promoted dynamics of fear, accentuated competition and suspicion between communities and criminalised whole communities despite violent actions were conducted only by isolated individuals.
The broader context within which people are living has not been addressed. This has led to narrow categorisation of threats and a waste of resources which focus only on potential ‘suspect Muslim radicals’ or on supposedly ‘non-integrated’ immigrants whilst no work has been done to improve societal relations as a whole or to address other security threats. For instance, it is striking that it was only in the counterterrorism strategy of 2009 that the British government acknowledged the need to address contextual factors leading to radicalisation, community grievances, and the threat posed by other extremist groups such as the far-right. However this threat was explicitly played down in the most recent Contest strategy published only a few days before the Norway incident that proved the contrary”.