Counter-Radicalisation Surveillance as a Public Health Measure

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores what it means to adopt a “public health” response to terrorism and presents findings from an empirical study of UK health professionals’ attitudes towards counter-radicalization responsibilities. The chapter demonstrates how counter-radicalization programs implemented through the public sector are archetypal examples of how policy and administration are being rethought in the twenty-first century around the new organizing concept of resilience. The incorporation of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) into counterterrorism occurs because healthcare workers have extensive contact with the public, not because the NHS is a site of insecurity where terrorist plots are hatched. The health sector is therefore now used as a component within a “big data” screening of the population for risky behaviours and ideologies. The integration of counterterrorism within the public sector organisations of European states is indicative of a wider epistemological transformation of twenty-first century governance and administration.