Resilience and soft power: an analysis of UK Government and International Guidelines and resources to address radicalisation and extremism in education

Since the London July bombings of 2005 there has been a proliferation of policy, web resources, guidelines and textbooks designed to support the way schools address extremism and radicalisation. This rapid growth in materials is prompted not just by the horror of the event but also by the realisation that the perpetrators were ‘home grown bombers’. That is the suicide bombers involved in the attack were the recipients of a conventional British education. This realisation was in part responsible for the turn towards education as an integral part of the government’s strategy to fight the spread of extremism reflected in, among other measures, the 2015 Anti-Terrorism Act, the Prevent duty and the 2012 Teachers’ Standards. The focus on schools is also a result of an awareness that ‘hard power’ approaches to fighting extremism: military intervention, incarceration and punitive action are not always effective (Aly et al, 2014; Ghosh et al, 2016). The use of ‘soft power’, initiatives: strategies designed to win hearts and minds, cultural incentives and education, and the turn toward resilience as a key strategy to prevent extremism are usually framed as pedagogies that may help teachers and pupils counter anti liberal narratives of intolerance, violence, hate and extremism. This chapter argues that the very strategies recommended by guidelines are often illiberal because they articulate an impoverished understanding of liberal practices and because of the ‘emptied out’ nature of many liberal traditions.