Counter-terrorism powers are widely seen to impact upon citizens and communities in the UK and beyond. Concern around incursions on civil liberties in the name of security as well as fears around the creation of new ‘suspect communities’, for instance, have pulled our attention to some of the more troubling consequences of the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’. While such concerns are significant and understandable, our own view is that too little effort has been spent speaking with ‘ordinary’ members of the public on the impact of counter-terrorism powers on their everyday lives. In this article, we seek to do this by asking how UK-based publics believe counter-terrorism should be conducted, and why these ideas or opinions might matter.
To get at this question, we conducted a series of focus groups with different populations across the UK on the theme of anti-terrorism, citizenship and security. We finished our focus groups with the question – ‘If you were in government, what would you do about terrorism?’. This article explores five prominent responses to this question, namely: increasing the use of punitive counter-terrorism measures; educational improvements; addressing alienation of individuals or communities; combating socio-economic deprivations; and, re-orienting British foreign policy.
These efforts in political imagination are important, we argue, because they allow insight into public experiences of social and political life beyond the operation of counter-terrorism mechanisms. Participants in our research, for example, approached this question (in part) as an opportunity to speak, inter alia, on the failures of multiculturalism, on the injustices of American imperialism, and on the impacts of globalization upon themselves and others. Taking these ‘vernacular’ discourses seriously, then, helps to re-centre the study of (international) politics around the voices and views of ‘ordinary’ people, as well as providing a space for such publics to debate and discuss the workings and consequences of (security) governance.
