White supremacy and the racial logic of the global preventing and countering violent extremism agenda

This article analyses what the disavowal of abject forms of white supremacy reveals about the racial logic of the global preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) agenda. We argue that the global P/CVE agenda is built on racialised concepts such as prevention, radicalisation and community – concepts that render it incommensurate with the newly identified problem of white supremacist violent extremism or domestic terrorism. Through analysis of interviews with experts and practitioners working within the broad field of P/CVE, we discursively analyse how the enmeshment of the agenda within the development and peacebuilding space exposes the agenda’s primary intent to manage presumably ungovernable populations in or from the so-called Global South. Taking the theoretical insights culled from textual analysis of practitioner interviews, we then consider the inclusion of right-wing extremism, and specifically white supremacy, within Western states’ domestic P/CVE agendas, primarily in the US. Our argument – that the move to consider far-right extremism within domestic CVE policy reveals rather than disrupts the P/CVE agenda’s racist foundations and intentions – contributes to a growing body of research that insists on attending to race, racialisation and racism within security studies and international relations, and which includes an emphasis on whiteness as an organising principle.