This chapter starts to challenge the narrative introduced in chapters 1 and 2, and establishes the central relation within Prevent between security and temporality. It argues that Prevent represents a novel ambition for the state: early intervention into processes of becoming violent. It thus intervenes within conditions of uncertainty, in that it is not certain whether such an individual would go on to participate in violence or any other illegal act. Engaging with the emergent academic literature in this area, the chapter argues that such intervention necessarily acts within conditions of uncertainty. This in turn requires discursive and institutional mechanisms that make such a threat knowable and actionable. The term preclusive is introduced here as a general term that emphasises this relation between security and temporality, making clear that all acts of securing are necessarily productive of a future threat they then preclusively act on to mediate. The chapter then demonstrates how the concept of radicalisation fulfils this function for Prevent, identifying potential future violence in the present.

This chapter sets out the scope and focus of the book. It introduces the records and context upon which the book is based and the way in which the legal evidence is used to examine women’s engagement with the legal system. It also places the book within its historiographical context by outlining existing key studies and the way that the book builds on these studies. Finally, it outlines the structure of the remainder of the book.

This chapter examines women from the English and colonial elite. It draws from women’s letters and correspondence to lawyers and family members to examine the depth of women’s legal knowledge, and how women participated in litigation even while they were under coverture. Different demographic patterns and inheritance laws across England and the colonies affected how elite women managed and protected their property, and defined the legal conflicts between women and their male relatives. In England the relative shortage of land and the likelihood of parents to live into old age often resulted in family feuds: widows who sought to gain their dower rights came into conflict with heirs eager to receive their full inheritance. In the colonies the fact that land was more abundant released some of the pressure between generations. However, the longer life-spans of people in New England, compared with those of people in the Chesapeake, had a significant impact on elite women’s control of property.

This chapter draws together the previous chapters to establish Prevent as a form of power that has played a key role in producing and policing contemporary British identities. It argues that this diagram enacts its own political geography, producing an account of identities as secure or risky based upon their coherence, or not, with a ‘British’ identity, and then seeking to act on those identities produced as alienated from, or outside of, this ‘normalised Britishness’. Read as an abstract diagram, the power Prevent mobilises need not be reduced to a focus on Muslim identity, and is translatable beyond its specific genesis. It then demonstrates the consequences this function of power has for the expression of politics in the UK, arguing it radicalises the relation of security and identity in the UK. In seeking to intervene early, it extends the scope of who must be secured (as signs of potential to violence must be managed) and who is responsible for such security (as all must now bear responsibility for identifying such signs).

This chapter demonstrates that the anlaysis of chapter 1 has been, historically, reproduced across much of the academic literature on Prevent. This literature, it will be argued, often sees the ‘solution’ to Prevent as the separation of its security and identity strands. It therefore positions the two strands as ‘separable’, failing to go beyond the questions that the policy itself asks. It can thus be argued that the academic literature, even when critical, has failed to develop an account of Prevent that conceptually grasps the relationship between security and identity established in the policy. This chapter then analyses two approaches to Prevent, emergent within the literature, that provide a means of moving beyond this position: first, an approach that argues Prevent has produced Muslims in the UK as a ‘suspect community’, and second, an approach that argues Prevent represents a strategy of counter-insurgency.

This chapter examines the expansion of the economy and how the development of equity law posed an increasing challenge to coverture and patriarchy in the eighteenth century. The legal regimes of England and the southern colonies gave women wide latitude to pursue investment and trade, and allowed married women greater financial independence than ever before. In urban areas of England and colonial America, married women were increasingly allowed to make contracts in their own names as feme sole traders. Equity law also expanded married women’s ability to retain control of their own property during marriage through the creation of new legal devices such as the simple agreement, equity to a settlement and restraint upon anticipation. Because of these economic and legal changes in the eighteenth century, family relationships came to be more defined by legal notions of contract rather than the mutual obligations that underpinned the patriarchal family.

Do fundamental rights obligate not only states, but also private transnational actors? That is the question addressed by this chapter. Since violations of fundamental rights stem from the totalising tendencies of partial rationalities, there is no longer any point in seeing the horizontal effect as if rights of private actors have to be weighed up against each other. On one side of the human-rights relation the fundamental-rights violator is no longer a private actor but the anonymous matrix of an autonomised communicative medium. On the other side, fundamental rights have to be divided into three dimensions: (1) institutional rights protecting the autonomy of social discourses against their subjugation by the totalising tendencies of the communicative matrix; (2) personal rights protecting the autonomy of communication, attributed not to institutions, but to the social artefacts called ‘persons’; (3) human rights as negative bounds on societal communication, where the integrity of individual’s body and mind is endangered.

How a constitution deals with its foundational paradox is not restricted to the state constitution alone, but is also relevant to the constitutions of other social systems. The starting point of this chapter is Niklas Luhmann’s argument that the law externalises its original paradox towards politics, while politics externalises its own towards the law. Over and above this, the question is raised about whether the law also pursues a comparable de-paradoxisation vis-à-vis other social subsystems. Meanwhile, the same question is asked in the opposite direction about whether other social systems also behave like politics, externalising their paradoxes towards the law with the aid of a constitution, or whether they employ alternative de-paradoxisations. Both of these lead to the concluding question, regarding which subsequent problems are generated by those externalisations.