My Written Evidence before the Parliamentary 'Prevent' Inquiry
In around september 2009, the House of Commons Select Committee for Communities and Local Government was soliciting written evidence as part of its inquiry into the 'Preventing Violent Extremism' programme. I decided to offer my own written submissions for the inquiry. All the submissions have now gone up, including mine - the good news is they've put up effectively two versions of my filings.
My main submission is here:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmcomloc/memo/previoex/uc1902.htm
This one is within the 3,000 word limit, and the theme deals primarily with the social factors behind violent radicalization, and offers a critique of the government's understanding and approach to this issue.
I also submitted an extended footnoted version of this, about 6,000 words long, which was filed as an appendix to the written submission by the conflict resolution charity, Forward Thinking. Somewhat unusually (and positively), the Committee not only published FT's submission, they also extracted my lengthier paper (originally titled something like 'Toward a Holistic Model of Violent Radicalization') from the appendix and published it as a separate 'supplementary memo'.
This longer version includes discussion of the more thorny and controversial security/intelligence issues that readers of this blog will be familiar with, including evidence of British intelligence cooptation of Islamist extremist networks like al-Muhajiroun etc. (this material was left out of the main submission due to word count issues)
So here's the longer version:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmcomloc/memo/previoex/uc19a02.htm
We plan to develop a more detailed version of this paper as a report in due course.
My main submission is here:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmcomloc/memo/previoex/uc1902.htm
This one is within the 3,000 word limit, and the theme deals primarily with the social factors behind violent radicalization, and offers a critique of the government's understanding and approach to this issue.
I also submitted an extended footnoted version of this, about 6,000 words long, which was filed as an appendix to the written submission by the conflict resolution charity, Forward Thinking. Somewhat unusually (and positively), the Committee not only published FT's submission, they also extracted my lengthier paper (originally titled something like 'Toward a Holistic Model of Violent Radicalization') from the appendix and published it as a separate 'supplementary memo'.
This longer version includes discussion of the more thorny and controversial security/intelligence issues that readers of this blog will be familiar with, including evidence of British intelligence cooptation of Islamist extremist networks like al-Muhajiroun etc. (this material was left out of the main submission due to word count issues)
So here's the longer version:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmcomloc/memo/previoex/uc19a02.htm
We plan to develop a more detailed version of this paper as a report in due course.