The Prevention of Extremism and the Role of Safety: Essay on a Well-Balanced Relationship Between Social Work and Law Enforcement

The prevention of extremism experienced two developments in recent years: the securitisation of the discourse and the diversification of the involved actors. Both trends caused a certain divergence because the different stakeholders often follow different logics, methods and goals and the influence of security in many cases does not match the needs and interests of civil actors offering prevention work. Especially social work has its own ethical and methodological understanding that requires an own conceptual approach. Above all, universal or primary prevention plays an important role. The aim of the paper is not to separate social work offers in the field of extremism prevention from security politics, but rather to develop an understanding of security that better matches social work profession. In order to solve the actual divergence, a novel conceptual approach—based on the term safety—is developed and applied on preventive measures driven by social or youth work in the field of extremism prevention. The paper develops the outlines of such a concept and various proper methods. In the same time, it reminds of concepts like social cohesion or resilience that also play a role in the discourse about extremism prevention. The paper describes the safety concept by distinguishing it from these related terms.