The counter-terrorist campus : securitisation theory and university securitisation – Three Models
Abstract
With intensified threats to global security from international terrorism, universities have
become a focus for security concerns and marked as locus of special interest for the monitoring
of extremism and counter-terrorism efforts by intelligence agencies worldwide.
Drawing on initiatives in the United Kingdom and United States, I re-frame three – covert,
overt and covert–overt – intersections of education, security and intelligence studies as a
theoretical milieu by which to understand such counter-terrorism efforts.
Against the backdrop of new legislative guidance for universities in an era of global terrorism
and counter-terrorism efforts by security and intelligence agencies and their Governments,
and through a review of Open-Source security/intelligence concerning universities in the
United Kingdom and the United States, I show how this interstitial (covert, overt and covert–
overt) complexity can be further understood by the overarching relationship between
securitisation theory and university securitisation.
An emergent securitised concept of university life is important because de facto it will
potentially effect radical change upon the nature and purposes of the university itself.
A current-day situation replete with anxiety and uncertainty, the article frames not only a sharply
contested and still unfolding political agenda for universities but a challenge to the very nature and
purposes of the university in the face of a potentially existential threat. Terrorism and counterterrorism,
as manifest today, may well thus be altering the aims and purposes of the university in
ways we as yet do not fully know or understand. This article advances that knowledge and
understanding through a theoretical conceptualisation: the counter-terrorist campus.