Northern Ireland has experienced decades of politically motivated violence, paramilitarism, and community polarisation on a scale unmatched elsewhere in the UK. This piece by Zara W. Tahir examines why Prevent has never been applied in Northern Ireland, what has been done instead, and what that tells us about whether Prevent is truly fit for purpose anywhere. In 2016, Andy Burnham, at the time the Shadow Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, compared the Prevent Duty to internment in Northern Ireland calling it “a policy felt to be highly discriminatory against one section of the community”.[1] Now, as Prime Minister, he has an opportunity — and arguably an obligation — to ask the question Northern Ireland has already answered by practice: is Prevent a counter-terrorism tool, or is it a mechanism for surveilling communities the state has already decided to distrust? A decade on, the Prevent strategy remains absent in its […]