The Prevent strategy’s theory that once held that ideology drives terrorism, now no longer describes the people it targets. This means Prevent has not evolved – rather, it has undone itself, writes Zara W. Tahir. Throughout history, the image of ‘the rider and the horse’ has been used as an aphorism for the relationship between emotions (the horse) and the intellect (the rider). Jonathan Haidt reconceptualizes this image as ‘the rider and the elephant’. Haidt explains in his book, ‘The Righteous Mind’, that when presented with a choice to make, we would like to think that we tally the pros and cons and then make our decision. But in reality, we have an emotional or intuitive response to the choice, and we create a narrative as a rational post-hoc justification for the decision we have already intuitively accepted. Thus, instead of the rational rider controlling the unruly intuitive horses, the […]