Securitising Education to Prevent Terrorism or Losing Direction?

This article examines the growing relationship between security and education, particularly in the light of the UK government’s Prevent Duty that seeks to tackle radicalization in a variety of milieus, including universities. However, rather than seeing this process as being merely one-way, through a so-called securitization of education, what is explored here is the dialectic between these two spheres. It is suggested that a heightened sensitivity to the supposed consequences of inflammatory rhetoric on the well-being of supposedly suggestible or vulnerable students has been in existence within education for quite some time.