Empirically explore how practitioners working on the prevent strand of the UK strategy - passing the violent threshold to constitute counter terrorism

This project is concerned with the grey area between extremism and terrorism in the United Kingdom's (UK) Prevent Strategy (HM Government, 2011). It is the result of, inter alia, a conceptual quagmire which has tended to obscure the boundaries between "acceptable" non-violent extremism and "unacceptable" not (yet) violent extremism (Lowe, 2017), with the latter justifiably requiring Prevent involvement for it being a conduit to terrorism. Yet, while academic debate has highlighted a large grey area between the two, chiefly focussing on the need for clearer distinctions between them, there has been a lack of focus on how Prevent practitioners in the local authority and police deal with the dilemma of identifying those who subscribe to the notion of not (yet) violent extremism (Schmid, 2014). This proposed study will fill this gap, narrowing the focus down to empirically explore how Prevent officers in these respective organisations judge an expression as passing the violent threshold needed to reconcile an expression with terrorism and constitute counter-terrorism involvement. This focus will be enabled through the application of the following research questions:
1. How do counter-terrorism practitioners respond to incidents occupying a grey area between extremism and terrorism?
2. In responding to those who may be on the cusp of terrorist engagement, what can be deemed as being 'good practice'?
3. What are the implications of responding to non-violent extremism through counter-terrorism instruments?