The logic of security has increasingly “saturated” contemporary politics, with growing discourse, legislation and policy aiming to counter vaguely defined extremist threats. Daniel Brown explores the consequences of this logic for communities and solidarity campaigns and actions.
On November 26th 2023, police vans arrived at a sleepy residential street in Haringey and dozens of police officers began to mass outside the Kurdish Community Centre there. The centre was busy, due to a cultural event, an evening of dancing, food, and music attended by many from the local community. Police later stated that “a flag supporting a proscribed terrorist organisation” seen at the centre by police a few days prior to the raid justified their presence.
Later, on the 26th, despite lacking a warrant and being refused entry, police officers suddenly rushed through the centre’s gates, shouting ‘move back!’. Footage of the events circulating online shows police with batons drawn in the courtyard, whilst other officers argue with community members blocking the doorway to the community centre building. Community members scrambled to move children present to the garden away from the chaos. The community quickly rallied against the raid blocking the police from entering. Confronted by a growing crowd the police then began to retreat from the centre.
The following morning the UK Kurdish Assembly released a statement condemning the raid and linking it to a meeting between UK defence minister Grant Shapps and his Turkish counterpart Yaşar Güler two days prior to the raid. Diplomatic pressure from Turkey (often with US support) has been a key factor in the criminalisation of Kurdish communities across Europe. In the run-up-to and aftermath of the 2023 Turkish elections many Kurdish activists reported growing levels of securitisation faced by diaspora in Europe.
The Assembly’s statement called for a rally against the raid the following week and announced a planned legal challenge to the raid. It also pointed to other incidents of repressive policing at Kurdish protests, including the trial of two activists for holding a Kurdish flag during a protest. The rally the following Sunday, was supported by various local community organisations and attended by hundreds of locals. It shows the importance of grassroots community organising in resisting such securitisation. Whilst solidarity with the Kurdish community is necessary in and of itself, we should remember that struggles against such criminalisation affect us all. A local trade unionist commenting on the rally argued, “an injury to one, is an injury to all.”
The Kurdish community’s response reflects the long history of suffering and resisting securitisation endured by many Kurds, not just in Turkey, Syria, Iraq or Iran (the four states whose borders partition Kurdistan), but also in Europe. Resistance to such criminalisation through combined legal and political struggles, supported by grassroots mobilisation, has been a key feature of Kurdish solidarity organising.
Turkey’s counter-insurgency against the Kurdish Freedom movement was internationalised in Europe in the 1990s, notably with the German state’s proscription of the PKK as a terrorist organisation in 1993 (soon followed by other European states). Many Kurds fleeing persecution by the Turkish state joined a growing diaspora in Europe including here in London. Even as they were granted asylum, they found themselves subject to growing securitisation. Their efforts to organise solidarity for the Kurdish cause were often stymied by European states’ counter-terrorism apparatuses.
Securitisation is a process where discourses identifying certain issues as existential threats to the security of a society lead to increasing support for and implementation of measures which restrict certain freedoms and violate legal and social norms in the name of promoting security. The logic of security has increasingly “saturated” contemporary politics, with growing discourse, legislation and policy often aiming to counter vaguely defined extremist threats.
In effect this works to normalise states of exception, overruling the norms of liberal democracy. Terrorism is deemed an exceptional threat to security, one which justifies expanding police powers which infringe on civil liberties like freedom of speech. Such practices often become routinised and normalised; instead of dispelling the threat of terrorism, they tend to be accompanied by heightened discourses of terror and the need for security. The amorphous and undefined boundaries of concepts like terror and security turn these exceptions into the rule of everyday life. Increased security measures at airports, for example, begin as responses to exceptional events but quickly become normalised even if their effectiveness is disputable.
Whilst discourses and legal regimes around terrorism begin by proscribing certain kinds of political violence this tends to expand into a general repression of any political activity which can feasibly be linked to such violence, and then continues to grow beyond that. The categorisation of ‘terrorist’ renders those accused beyond politics, instead casting them as an existential threat to society, one which justifies restricting the norms of that society itself. This process of securitisation has its roots in Cold War counter-insurgencies but accelerated rapidly during the ‘global war on terror’.
Certainly, in Turkey the categorisation of PKK insurgents as terrorists quickly spread to proscribe any expression of Kurdishness as terrorism and increasingly terrorism discourses are used to justify repression of any opposition to Erdoğan’s regime. Similarly, sweeping counter-terrorism powers in the UK are increasingly accompanied by discourses attempting to de-legitimise political opponents by linking them to terrorism. From accusations of “terrorist sympathising” levied against Jeremy Corbyn to recent attempts to portray Palestine solidarity protests as extremist “hate marches”, such rhetoric is worryingly common in British politics, and the world over. In the case of Palestine solidarity, these discourses result in calls to increase government powers and justify intensified policing.
The racialised nature of the term terrorism is linked to similar calls to get ‘tough on crime’ or crack down on migration often accompanied by racist dog whistles. The moral panics such calls invoke become the justification for extending authoritarian laws and policies. Just as the racist violence of colonialism produced and normalised techniques of authoritarian violence which would return to the heart of empire as fascism, the racialised logics of securitisation are a key driver of right-wing authoritarianism.
Indeed, one response to Palestine protests has been increased efforts by the British government to broaden its ‘counter-extremism’ program Prevent. The program has been criticised for its definition of extremism and disproportionate targeting of Muslim communities. Events like the raid in Haringey reflect a broader pattern of the state pushing the boundaries of securitisation. Similarly, the use of Schedule 7 counter-terror powers to stop, search and interrogate suspects at the border reflects a similar trend. Such powers have long been used against Kurdish activists but have been used ever more broadly. Recent examples include the detention and arrest of French publisher Ernest Moret in April 2023, and earlier this year the interrogation of a British teenager about participation in Palestine solidarity marches. In many ways, the normalisation of such powers’ use in one context affects other struggles too. And whilst marginalised communities bear the brunt of this securitisation, the authoritarianism it enables affects us all. In this sense, insisting on the interconnectedness of political struggles is not merely a slogan but a political reality which affects securitisation and resistance to it.
In the aftermath of the Met raid in Haringey, as the community gathered to dance, much of the discussion turned to growing levels of securitisation described by one activist as a “ratchet effect” where once a certain level of securitisation is normalised it becomes locked in and difficult to reverse. Solidarity with communities on the frontline of these racialised logics of securitisation is vital for its own sake, but it is also key to resisting a broader climate of authoritarianism. The logic of terrorism tends to shut down political discussion, like other notions of criminality it is a deeply racialised category which ironically enough is employed to spark moral panics, to evoke terror of terror. Solidarity with racialised communities targeted by such strategies, like Palestinian and Kurdish communities, is not just an ethical imperative then but also a fight to protect all our freedoms.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the Department of Sociology, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Photo by James Eades on Unsplash
