Counter-Extremism and ‘Critical Thinking’ as a Measure of the Human

Abstract

Educational approaches to counter-extremism are proliferating globally, claiming to foster ‘critical thinking’ amongst those deemed vulnerable to extremism. These projects ‘make sense’ through two mutually-reinforcing discourses: a psychological discourse that adjudicates the moral value of different ways of thinking through scientific measures; and an ethical discourse of liberal education that idealizes critical thinking as essential to human development – becoming more human and humane. Counter-extremism mobilizes both to over-represent a ‘dominant genre of being’, to take Sylvia Wynter’s phrase, as if it were the only way of being human. Such projects show how expert and everyday understandings of ‘critical thinking’ have been shaped by psychology’s history as a race science and liberal understandings of education that have legitimated hierarchies of being human. I argue that these conditions of possibility that shape critical thinking must be grappled with in any critical pursuit against hierarchies of being human.

‘Extremism’ is rooted in a lack of critical thinking. This premise drives globally popular projects for countering extremism through education. Since the onset of the ‘war on terror’, a popular psychological discourse has attempted to adjudicate the moral value of different ways of thinking through ‘objective’ conclusions about cognitive development and the capacity for critical thought. Theorizations of how ‘better developed’ thinking leads to more humane behavior can be seen, for example, in pop psychology titles like The Righteous Mind (Haidt, 2012) and The Better Angels of Our Nature (Pinker, 2011). While the ‘war on terror’ has shown that psychological expertise can facilitate morally reprehensible tactics like torture and that such expertise then has no unique claim to morality (Shaw, 2016), the premise that psychological expertise can prevent extremism through interventions that foster ‘critical thinking’ persists. It is enshrined in the United Nations’ agenda of Preventing Violent Extremism through Education, incorporated into national policies, and embedded in development funding opportunities, amplifying the agenda’s influence in the Global South (Bastani and Gazzotti, 2021; Novelli, 2017). This valorization of ‘critical thinking’ as an essential tool for countering extremism demands reflection from those who hold critical thinking dear – we who encourage it in our teaching, theorize through it, and live our lives in ways informed by it.

The widely treasured educational goal of cultivating critical thinking is often assumed to be a tool for resisting oppression, not reinstating it; still, we must hold it to a mirror. This is urgent because counter-extremism projects are extensively shown to perpetuate anti-Muslim racism. What conditions have enabled a popular vision of ‘cognitive improvement’ via the cultivation of critical thinking as a method of counter-extremism? With what consequences?

Through reflections on my research on counter-extremism in the UK and its global influence, this article shows that the valorization of critical thinking as a safeguard against extremism ‘makes sense’ through two mutually reinforcing discourses: a psychological discourse of cognitive development that adjudicates the moral value of different ways of thinking through scientific measures and an ethical discourse of liberal education that idealizes critical thinking as essential to human development – becoming more fully human and humane. I contend that the global mission of fostering critical thinking for/through counter-extremism is shaped by the historical influence of psychology as an authoritative science for constituting race and racialized religion, and by powerful liberal understandings of education and critical thinking that have roots in colonial projects. Counter-extremism mobilizes critical thinking as it is understood in both discourses to characterize and over-represent one ‘genre of being’ human (Wynter, 2003), so that this genre of the cognitively developed and therefore humane critical thinker appears as the only way of being fully human.

Rethinking critical thinking is therefore necessary for grappling with how it is conversely mobilized to racialize the dominant genre’s Others as not (yet) fully human by characterizing the latter as not (yet) capable of critical thinking. I pursue this rethinking guided by the works of Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, who have contributed immensely to the understanding of how racism dehumanizes. In pointing to how counter-extremism uses critical thinking as a metric for racializing Muslims as not yet fully human, my purpose is not to suggest a fix for counter-extremism through a better understanding of critical thinking. Counter-extremism is racist by design, not accident (see also Khan, 2023). Rather, my aim in rethinking critical thinking is to strengthen critical pursuits against hierarchies of being human.

To be clear, my critique is not aimed at critical theory, which can be imprecisely distinguished as theorizing that renders the latent manifest. While the practice of critique may adopt critical thinking as methodology, it may also critique formations of it. I am sketching out ‘critical thinking’ as it circulates in everyday usage through political institutions, hubs of psychological research and practice, and spaces of formal education. I speak of the commonsensical assumptions about ‘critical thinking’ that have become the background of everyday life in these institutions and the spaces they cut across. Bringing these assumptions to the foreground clarifies the genre of being human that they overrepresent.

Critical Thinking in/about Counter-Extremism

Counter-extremism broadly has been convincingly critiqued for treating (those perceived as) Muslim as suspects (Kundnani, 2014) and subjecting them to exceptional measures like detention and citizenship deprivation (Kapoor and Narkowicz, 2019). In this first section, I further question the global turn to ‘educational’ counter-extremism specifically, by looking at the building blocks of this approach – the unexceptional discourses that make educational counter-extremism ‘make sense’.

The extensively critiqued exceptional mechanisms through which counter-extremism negatively racializes Muslims are in fact enabled by a set of normal conditions. To elucidate the latter, I understand racism through Wynter’s (2003) terms as the ‘coloniality of being’, that is, the over-representation of the dominant genre of being human – Man – so much so that this culturally sedimented imagination of being human comes to appear as the only way of being so. By excluding its Others from this genre, the globally dominant ethnoclass (white and wealthy) differentially excludes them from being fully human or human at all. Building on Quijano’s (2007) notion of ‘coloniality of power’, Wynter shows that the ‘coloniality of being’ functions through a set of conventions, as all genres do. Superior thinking capacity has long been such a feature of the dominant genre of being. When we question how counter-extremism presently targets Muslims as improperly human, critical thinking as a characteristic that is ‘always already’ (Wynter, 2003: 276) associated with the dominant genre of being comes again into sharp focus.

The ‘soft hand’ of counter-terrorism, counter-extremism purports to focus on supporting those ‘vulnerable’ to radicalization, through caring means like education. Counter-extremism can be distinguished from other counter-terrorism tactics in three ways: it prioritizes a pre-emptive approach to potential violence (Heath-Kelly, 2017); it operates through support and care; it recruits non-traditional security actors like social workers, healthcare workers, and educators (de Goede et al., 2014). In the counter-extremism recommendations of international organizations, ‘education institutions are often tasked a role’ (Davies, 2018: 3). For example, the United Nations Secretary-General’s Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism calls for further investment in Global Citizenship Education. International networks have formed to support this agenda and share best practices, like the Youth and Education working group of the European Commission’s Radicalization Awareness Network.

Proponents of educational approaches to counter-extremism suggest that critical thinking skills naturally lead to the adoption of shared ‘peaceful’ values of the liberal international order. UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization)’s ‘Teacher’s Guide on the Prevention of Violent Extremism’ (UNESCO, 2016) defines Global Citizenship Education as promoting ‘fundamental values that help raise the defenses of peace’ (UNESCO, 2016: 15) and encourages teachers to help prevent extremism by pursuing ‘cognitive goals’ like the development of critical thinking (UNESCO, 2016: 19). A policy paper by the aforementioned Radicalization Awareness Network similarly highlights the importance of developing critical thinking for ‘mainstreaming prevention in education’ and promoting ‘common values of freedom, equality and pluralism’ (Nordbruch and Sieckelinck, 2018: 23). States have adopted and adapted this framework. Prevent, the domestic branch of the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy, stands out as ‘foundational’ and has been used as a model internationally (Sabir, 2016: 1–15). The UK’s strategy for preventing opposition to ‘fundamental values’ was set up (covertly) in 2003, expanded in 2005 in response to attacks in London on 7 July, revised in 2011 and again through the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, which made partaking in Prevent’s implementation a legal duty for public institutions like health and education.

Due to its centrality in this field, Prevent is indicative of how counter-extremism more broadly adopts critical thinking as an anti-political tool for fostering values already deemed desirable. The Prevent Guidance for education and higher education, for example, marks these arenas as essential for protecting ‘fundamental values’, noting their existing ‘commitment to freedom of speech’ and to ‘the advancement of knowledge’ (Home Office, 2015b). At the same time, the strategy seems more concerned with the enforcement of one way of knowing than the ‘advancement of knowledge’, defining extremism as:

opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. (Home Office, 2015a)

Educationalists are expected to refer students who seem ‘vulnerable’ to such extremism to Prevent. Referrals are triaged by the police; those deemed alarmingly ‘vulnerable’ are handled through Channel, a multi-agency process, which can involve psychiatrists, counsellors, or religious leaders (Home Office, 2015b).

International parallels of such tactics abound. The Netherlands and Sweden also recruit non-traditional security actors for counter-extremism (Ambrozik, 2019: 108). State-led training for teachers to spot radicalization is in place in France (Harris-Hogan et al., 2019: 733). Donor-funded counter-extremism projects in the Global South too often target educational spaces (Bastani and Gazzotti, 2021; Novelli, 2017). Counter-extremism policies then look to education not as a space for exploring what may be politically desirable ways of being in the world but rather as a space for fostering a way of being already deemed superior and policing opposition to it.

Critiques of Prevent reflect criticisms of the ‘educational’ and ‘psychological’ turn in global counter-extremism. While essential in showing the exceptional treatment of (those perceived as) Muslims, critiques of the policy are most powerful when they reveal the ordinary logics that enable the racialization of Muslims as such (for example Abbas, 2013; Abu-Bakare, 2022; Ali, 2020). Critics have effectively problematized how Prevent targets Muslims through security discourses that ‘co-opt’ education and psychology. They point to counter-extremism’s ‘securitization’ of education (Gearon, 2017) – the marking of education institutions as a site of existential threat and thus an important site for countering this threat – and the ‘securitization’ of Muslims in education settings (Saeed, 2016). They show how ‘securitization’ limits the possibility for thinking critically about ‘the political status quo’ (Danvers, 2021; Winter et al., 2022: 102). In parallel, others insightfully elucidate Prevent’s epidemiological logic – by pathologizing extremism as a mental illness, Prevent de-politicizes extremism (Younis, 2021).

Read together, these critiques illuminate counter-extremism’s logic: those diagnosed as psychologically ‘vulnerable’ can be educated into ethical subjecthood as ‘Good Muslims’ (Mamdani, 2002) who can think, critically. In turn, some scholars have reasonably argued for ‘preserving education’s autonomy from security agendas’ and protecting its ethic of open critical inquiry (O’Donnell, 2016: 72). Still, that which is commonly understood as ‘critical thinking’ is part of the problem: as Abu-Bakare (2022) shows in a discussion of counter-terrorism expertise and practice, whiteness still characterizes itself through superior reasoning capacity. Problematizations of the ‘misuse’ of psychology and education can push us beyond nostalgia for their functions before ‘securitization’. Questioning the ordinary logics of these fields, instead of assuming their innocence, can help us grasp how they secure the boundaries of being human.

First, an overemphasis on ‘misuse’ underplays psychology’s function as a science of race. In contrast, Sian (2017) insightfully compares the physiological ‘race-thinking’ of 19th-century criminology with the 2015 Extremism Risk Guidance 22+ framework informing Prevent. The latter proposes that ‘vulnerability’ to extremism can be identified through racialized psychological features. Both frameworks use racializing metrics to identify those likely to commit crimes or engage in extremism. Sian (2017: 5) concludes that ‘the only twist’ is that ‘the seemingly biological has been replaced by a stronger focus on the cultural’. Younis (2021) highlights the necessity of psychological expertise in facilitating this shift. This expertise allows ‘nation-states to evade the charge of racism in their management of Muslim political agency’ by leaning on a ‘universal, psychological profile’ of potential extremists (Younis, 2021: 37). Psychological expertise then is counter-extremism’s preferred mode of articulating racial hierarchy.

The distinctly psychological discourse informing counter-extremism demands attention for what it reveals about the dominant genre of being human. The dominant ‘biocentric’ conception of the human that shaped 19th-century race science influenced all social and human sciences, including psychology (Wynter, 2001: 37). Wynter’s (2003) articulation of ‘bioeconomic Man’ illuminates this biocentrism. She argues that bioeconomic Man, characterized by natural fitness for survival in an economic order that requires rational utilitarianism, has been the dominant genre of being since the ‘Darwinian revolution’. The genre’s terms also define ‘the archipelago of its modes of Human Otherness’ (Wynter, 2003: 321). The struggle between the dominant ethno-class – characterized by whiteness, masculinity, cis-heteronormativity, normative markers of ability, and access to wealth – and ‘the rest’ is overwhelmingly understood as evolutionary competition between those who are or are not fit for biological-cum-economic survival (Wynter, 2003). Prevent’s terms for defining its target – those exhibiting ‘symptoms’ of ‘vulnerability’– indicate the persisting prevalence of biocentric terms and, specifically, their articulation through the psychological.

A second concern is the limited attention given to how ‘normal’ educational rationales collaborate with psychological expertise to co-construct counter-extremism’s logic. Research has found little to show that critical thinking prevents so-called extremism (Krueger and Malečková, 2003: 142), yet counter-extremism initiatives continue to insist on a lack of critical thinking as a tell-tale ‘vulnerability’. As scholars, we are perhaps especially ‘vulnerable’ to the assumption that counter-extremism’s educational logic is theoretically innocent and sullied in practice, when Muslims are singled out as lacking critical thinking. I grapple here with how educational conventions shape the dominant genre of being and institute its exclusionary terms. As Wynter argues (in an interview with Bedour Alagraa), education is ‘initiation’ into a dominant genre (Alagraa and Wynter, 2021). The following sections show how counter-extremism enacts such initiations through ordinary educational and psychological rationales.

‘See the World in Black and White?’

When we do not take their innocence for granted, ‘normal’ educational values and expert psychological metrics begin to look less like incidentally co-opted spheres of influence for counter-extremism and more like its building blocks. I began to consider how psychological metrics fundamentally shape educational counter-extremism initiatives in 2019, when I came across the promotional materials of a UK-based research centre that focuses on preventing violent extremism. The promotional content read:

Can you recognize multiple perspectives on a given issue? Or, do you see the world in black and white? These questions relate to a psychological measure of ‘complex cognition’, which can be used to predict potential for violence. (Fieldnotes)

Staffed by psychology researchers and practitioners, this research centre aims to combat vulnerability to extremism through the promotion of a ‘healthy range of values’ (Report). ¹ The centre characterizes cognitive vulnerability through the contrast between healthy, ‘complex’ cognition and an underdeveloped one unable to balance different perspectives. To analyze the kind of expertise that informs a ‘thinking-focused’ or ‘cognitive’ approach to counter-extremism, I refer here to my conversations with two researchers at the centre, a senior member, Dr. Smith, and a more junior member, Dr. Williams, and my reading of their pilot project in the UK aimed at Muslim youth. ²

A member of the Radicalisation Awareness Network, this research centre’s ability to amass funding for projects in distinct locations speaks to its international profile and the globalizing nature of the ‘cognitive’ approach it exemplifies. Aside from receiving Home Office funding under the remit of Prevent to run pilot interventions aimed at countering extremism, this research centre has designed counter-extremism interventions around the world, including in Pakistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kenya. Its past projects have been funded by Prevent, the EU, USAID, and the International Organization of Migration (IOM). These projects entail creating interventions to combat ‘black and white thinking’, reflecting the premise that ‘extremist violence’ can be predicted and prevented by focusing on how well people think (Fieldnotes). The specific project I will refer to in this section was funded by Prevent and reveals some of the policy’s framing logics. While those involved with the research centre present its methods as very distinct, the overarching premise of targeting how people think to prevent vulnerability to extremism is typical of the proliferating educational approach in the UK and elsewhere. The Radicalisation Awareness Network’s Youth and Education Working Group includes other similarly framed initiatives such as ‘Dare to be Grey’, a foundation set up by a group of students at Utrecht University in the Netherlands in 2016, which has since received funding from the European Commission, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the United Nations to pursue interventions that move people ‘beyond black and white thinking’. ³

This thinking-focused approach has proven particularly powerful as a seemingly well-intentioned approach that accounts for previous criticisms about counter-extremism’s treatment of Muslims as suspects. For example, this research centre responds to critics of counter-extremism projects by noting that the ‘broad-brush approach’ of prevention initiatives has received criticism because it ‘might appear to target Muslims’ (Report, my emphasis). In turn, the centre presents its approach as more effectively and non-discriminatorily focusing on ‘cognition’, that is, on how people think, instead of the beliefs of a target community (Report). Commissioned to work with Muslim communities through the rubric of Prevent, this research centre then ran a pilot programme across England from 2007 to 2010, with the aim of fostering thinking that does not require ‘picking between’ Muslim and British identity. The pilot intervention took place in university and community college settings, a community group for Somali immigrants, and local Prevent projects. In the first stage, participants were ‘taught’ to ‘differentiate’ between viewpoints by watching filmed interviews with Muslim speakers presenting different perspectives on topics that could be ‘used by radicalizers’. Next, participants were presented with thematic ‘opposed value ends’ like ‘scientific modes of knowing’ versus ‘religious modes of knowing’, ‘women and men as being similar’ versus ‘women and men as being different’, and ‘Western self-indulgence’ versus ‘marriage at a young age’, and asked to locate the values of the speakers and their own on the scale between them. Finally, participants were presented with a role-play scenario, where integration of opposed ends of a ‘value scale’ was necessary for reaching a compromise (Report).

Yet, the focus on ‘structures of thinking’ can maintain the premise that Muslims are especially ‘vulnerable’ to extremism. The Report on this pilot, for example, does this by suggesting that young Muslims are especially vulnerable to uncritical, ‘us versus them’ thinking through circumstance, not any fault of their own. The Report situates this ‘vulnerability’ in the context of ‘rapid globalization’ and supposedly concomitant identity confusion. The project then argues that extremist groups target this ‘vulnerability’ by presenting ‘black and white fixes’ to ‘complex’ social issues; in turn, this ‘vulnerability’ can be reduced by increasing ‘capacity’ for complex thinking and ‘value pluralism’, facilitating imagination of ‘value-complex fixes’ (Report). The pilot intervention then set out to foster an increase in the young Muslim participants’ thinking capacity by ‘subverting caricatures’ or oversimplifications of values and identities to which they are supposedly especially vulnerable (Report).

While this kind of focus on ‘thinking structures’ allows psychology experts to understand their counter-extremism metrics as value-neutral, this supposed neutrality is less convincing when we consider the ideologically-laden understanding that informs the ‘opposed value ends’ participants were asked to synthesize through better critical thinking. For example, the Report explains:

While extremist ideologies focus on the draw of one end of a value scale, like ‘economic justice,’ and entirely exclude the draw of its opposite, like ‘economic freedom,’ we enable participants to explore both ends.

Later in the Report, economic freedom is casually defined as ‘free market capitalism’. It would seem then that showing capacity for critical thinking about the economy necessarily requires synthesizing values of economic justice and free market capitalism. There is a tension here: the premise that ‘extremism’ can be avoided by learning to think ‘better’ paradoxically suggests that the moral quality of how one thinks can be evaluated through value-neutral metrics. When I pointed to this tension with my interlocuters, Dr. Smith underscored that they ‘are not telling people what to think’ and are only ‘trying to increase their inherent capacities’ (interview, 2019). Dr. Williams added that their approach is ‘agnostic to morality’. She brought up the abolition of slavery in the US as an example, positing that abolitionists would have been seen to lack ‘complex cognition’ on the topic of slavery according to the centre’s metrics. She insisted, however, that whether there are situations like this where less complex thinking or even violence is acceptable is not a matter on which their method takes a stance (interview, 2019).

Despite this unsettling ambivalence, which is embedded in the common aim of counter-extremism agendas, the latter still set out to prevent extremism by improving how people think through supposedly ‘neutral’ scientific metrics that conveniently mark value commitments hostile to status quo politics as uncritical. No doubt, existing understandings of critical thinking and its inherent value are an essential part of what makes such prescriptions ‘sensible’. The following two sections consider how the premise of preventing ‘vulnerability’ to extremism through ‘cognitive’ improvement is shaped by powerful discourses with which our present is sedimented: psychology’s historically authoritative discourse of race science and liberal understandings of education.

‘Insensible to All Shades of Meaning’

The developmental discourse of improving Others’ minds has a history of shaping the management of threats to the (post)colonial international order and its dominant genre of being human since the late 19th century. Scholarship has elucidated the role that psychology and psychiatry played in maintaining this order (Keller, 2001; Linstrum, 2016). A psychological rationale helped to justify the exclusion of colonial subjects from politics as necessary because ‘they’ could not think in the right way. It provided a legitimizing discourse for holding colonial Others in the ‘waiting room of history’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 8).

Ahead of the 1919 peace process, victorious nations established inquiries into ‘scientific facts’ about territories they would inherit. While these committees included geographers, historians, and imperial bureaucrats, they uniformly looked to ‘psychological conceptions’ of national consciousness to evaluate ‘the mental evolution of groups’ (Sluga, 2006: 31). Psychology was beginning to establish its legitimacy as a ‘properly scientific’ discipline, shaking off its reputation as armchair musings and travelers’ lore. Whether or not committees looked to psychology merely because it provided a conveniently malleable metric, that they could do so to shape their policies indicates its increasing authority. This authority was one condition of possibility for the Mandate System that emerged and its vision of ‘preparing’ colonies for independence by fostering their capacity for national consciousness (Sluga, 2006). The peace process, a foundational moment for the international order, began an educational mission aimed at universalizing a psychological ideal of ‘cognitively developed’ (and therefore, nationally conscious) Man as the only way of being a fully human (and therefore) self-determining political subject.

In the interwar years, psychology continued to provide scientific language for discussing the ‘educability’ of peoples subject to British colonial rule (Campbell, 2013). After the Second World War, the now established discipline again shaped justifications for colonial ‘tutelage’. For example, as colonial powers faced anti-colonial uprisings, the project of securing the dominant genre through psychologically-informed tactics actualized starkly in Kenya. Dr. Carothers’ (1954) infamous report, Psychology of Mau Mau, advised the colonial government on its punishing counterinsurgency in the ‘Kenya Emergency’. Carothers (1954: 3) outlined cognitive characteristics of ‘the African’ as a tendency toward ‘extreme thinking’ and an inability to ‘look critically at himself and the world’. He argued, ‘the African’ subject is ‘teachable’, and ‘teaching’ must come through culture change. The main lesson to be taught, he argued, was ‘that they are only local examples of a highly homogenous humanity’ (Carothers, 1954: 25). Thus, the psychologist marked ‘how people think’ as a primary site of counterinsurgency, with the aim of securing the over-representation of one genre of being.

The newfound political authority of psy-discourses did not only shape counterinsurgency in the British Empire. Fanon famously critiqued how French psychiatrists explained away Algerian uprisings. They presented insurgent violence as a manifestation of the supposed irrationality of Algerians:

The North African likes extremes. . . . He is insensible to shades of meaning. . . . the sense of balance, the weighing and pondering of an opinion or action clashes with his most intimate nature. (Fanon, 2021 [1963]: 241–242)

Algerians were thus described as prone to thinking that ‘excluded all synthesis’ (Fanon, 2021 [1963]: 241–242). This diagnosis cast the dominant ethnoclass as sensible, nuanced, and capable of complex thinking, and its Others as incapable of such qualities. Fanon (1969: 10–17) charged that by approaching Algerian patients in this way, French psychiatrists were unable to diagnose their conditions, which he argued were partly shaped by these very assumptions.

Still, psychology has been a double-edged sword in relation to anti-colonial struggles and racial justice. Fanon’s own critiques emerged from psychological thinking. He noted that while ‘situational diagnosis’ was a cutting-edge method of psychosomatics, psychiatrists did not account for Algerian patients’ situation in their diagnoses (Fanon, 1969: 13). They were unable to, because this would require consideration of the colonial situation, and their own part in it. Even if doctors attempted to consider the patient’s ‘relations . . . sense of security . . . the dangers that threaten him [sic]’ (Fanon, 1969: 10), they would likely do so with assumptions of the colonial subject’s extremism and ‘falsely imagined’ sense of insecurity. Fanon (1969: 14) tells the paradigmatic doctors that to make a true diagnosis, they would have to account for their own relation to ‘this man whom you thingify’. They would have to account for the role of French doctors in the dehumanization of colonized people. In this way, Fanon’s critique points to the importance of his psychological concept of ‘sociogeny’ – which points to ways of being human as ‘always already socialized’ (Wynter, 2001: 33) – for diagnosis and ‘cure’.

The concept of sociogeny develops psychological thinking, even as it critiques the discipline’s willful ignorance of the socio-political. Sociogeny, as Wynter argues, puts forward the impossibility of thinking about an individual or group’s way of being without considering ‘the worm-eaten roots of the structure’ (Fanon, 1967: 11; Wynter, 1999: 12). Fanon’s critique opened ‘a new cognitive frontier’ by calling for a prognosis that did not aim to ‘adjust the individual to society’ (Wynter, 1999: 12). Sociogeny instead points to social relations, and their mode of instituting a limited notion of being human, as the location of ‘pathology’: accordingly, ‘the prognosis is that of overall social transformation’ (Wynter, 1999: 12). Wynter’s adapted term, the sociogenic principle, designates the ‘organizational principle of each culture’s criterion of being/non-being’ (Wynter, 2001: 54). This principle is the logic that institutes the over-representation of the dominant genre of being.

Insights about the sociogenic principle can deepen our understanding of the terms and reasoning through which the dominant ethnoclass over-represents itself. Fanon’s analysis, for example, shows that colonial psychiatrists’ diagnoses secured the dominant genre by producing its modes of human Otherness through terms like insensibility to nuance. The next section turns to how contemporary counter-extremism draws on both this historically conditioned psychological rationale and liberal conceptions of education and critical thinking to reproduce the governing sociogenic principle. The latter racializes through the re-invention of supposedly neutral metrics for evaluating the development of thinking capacity and diagnosing ‘cognitive vulnerability’.

Anti-Politics of Critical Thinking

Psychological metrics for evaluating Others’ minds have been historically tied to the question of whether and how those deemed not (fully) human by the dominant ethnoclass and its genre of being could be educated to become so. The understanding of education that has been conditioned by this history is therefore equally essential to how counter-extremism today takes up this same question. This section considers how common liberal conceptions of ‘critical thinking’ shape counter-extremism and its promotion of moral agnosticism toward institutionalized injustices that reflect hierarchies of being human. This is the final piece of the puzzle drawn out by this paper: how does critical thinking foster an anti-politics, ensuring a lack of contestation against the dominant genre of being human?

In presenting this last piece, I am conscious of Bell’s (2014: 682–689) critique of the ‘dizzying variety of ways’ in which scholarship uses the liberal label; accordingly, I do not aim to indicate ‘an ahistorical set of liberal commitments’. Following Bell (2014: 685), by liberal conceptions of education and critical thinking I refer to those ‘that have been classified as liberal, and recognized as such by other self-proclaimed liberals’. Liberal conceptions of education have a history of racializing Others with reference to (critical) thinking capacity.

Educational counter-extremism determines peoples’ capacity for legitimate political engagement through metrics of ‘cognitive development’ that shape and are shaped by common conceptions of ‘balance’ and ‘tolerance’ in liberal understandings of education. Recall how the above-discussed research centre posits that extremists pull in vulnerable people through the draw of one ‘end of a value scale’ to the exclusion of its opposite. The project report gives ‘economic justice’ and ‘economic freedom’, defined as ‘free market capitalism’, as examples of opposite ends of ‘a value scale’ (Report). The intervention’s stated aim is to encourage more balanced, less ‘black and white’, thinking. However, free market capitalism and economic justice are not opposed extremes of a single value scale that can be synthesized to reach a happy ‘gray’ middle – they are distinct, potentially irreconcilable value systems. What is promoted by such interventions as ‘balancing’ thinking from ‘both extremes’ is then actually a position of indecision between different ideologies. Thus, while the researchers characterized their approach as ‘agnostic to morality’, such counter-extremism efforts in fact drive an ethic of moral agnosticism.

In its hostility to conviction, this ethic amounts to passive acceptance of the status quo by default. Conceptions of critical thinking that shape this ethic often draw on John Stuart Mill’s case for freedom of speech. Mill’s argument is that ‘many of our past opinions . . . have turned out to be false’, so this may also be the case for our current convictions (Bilgrami, 2015: 12). We should then ‘tolerate dissenting opinions just in case our current opinions are wrong’ (Bilgrami, 2015: 13). As Akeel Bilgrami has argued (Bilgrami, 2015: 16), this conclusion manifests in demands to balance ‘both sides of a disagreement’ in liberal institutions. This demand for ‘idle doubt’ defers the possibility of thinking critically for the purpose of adopting strong political commitments (Bilgrami, 2015: 16) – instead, doing so signals ‘vulnerability’ to extremism. This doubtful understanding of critical thinking is embedded in liberal higher education institutions, supporting a cultural context in which counter-extremism’s de-politicization of opposition to the status quo as cognitive underdevelopment appears commonsensical.

The developmental vision of education that constructs dissenting Others as ‘pre-political’ – that is, not yet ‘mentally fit’ for political engagement – is also historically conditioned by ‘secular conceptions of the political’ that are racializing (Chakrabarty, 2000: 15). In British colonies, those who did not abandon religion in their protests were dismissed as pre-political; becoming properly political was contingent on ‘colonial rule and education’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 8). When Mahmood (2006) first pointed to the odd foreign policy consensus that terror’s root cause was the unsophisticated interpretative skills of Muslims, she was making strange the ‘commonsensical’ assumptions inherited from the colonial tradition of treating racialized religious hermeneutics as the cause of violence (see also Khan, 2023). The problem was readily and exclusively imagined to be that ‘fundamentalists’ were reading the Qur’an too literally – uncritically (see also Asad, 2013). With counter-extremism’s focus on ‘cognitive skills’ now globally commonplace, being properly political remains contingent on educational development.

Counter-extremism’s promotion of critical thinking as an antidote to violence brings together this liberal understanding of education and allied psychological metrics, resulting in a dangerously effective tool for delegitimizing the ethnoclass’s Others as pre-political, vulnerable, and desperately in need of education regarding how to think. For example, Prevent policy documents have argued that ‘Support for violence is associated with . . . an aspiration to defend Muslims when they appear to be under attack’ (Home Office, 2011: 18, my emphasis). They explain:

Issues which can contribute to a sense that Muslim communities are being unfairly treated include so-called ‘stop and search’ powers used by the police under counter-terrorism legislation; the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy; a perception of biased and Islamophobic media coverage; and UK foreign policy, notably with regard to Muslim countries. (Home Office, 2011: 18, my emphases)

This statement frames both ‘vulnerability’ to extremism and criticisms of the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy as problems relating to flawed perceptions (and not actualities) of how Muslims are treated by social and political institutions. It is given credence by expertise that claims Muslims are especially vulnerable to ‘us versus them’ thinking. Yet, the ‘us versus them’ perceptions that supposedly foster vulnerability to ‘extremism’ can hardly be mapped onto the inability to think critically. The concerns Prevent names as contributing to a false ‘sense that Muslim communities are being unfairly treated’ can be critically understood as unjust treatment. They are extensively analyzed as such in scholarship and reports (for example Kiai, 2016). While Prevent suggests that the sense that UK Muslims are ‘under attack’ signals a lack of critical thinking, this sense is rather based on counter-terrorism legislation that erodes civil liberties, anti-Muslim media coverage, and the UK’s militaristic foreign policy (Kapoor and Narkowicz, 2019). A perception of these political realities as ‘black and white’ is informed by the actually sharp ‘imbalance’ between the treatment of the dominant ethnoclass and its Others.

My contention is this: the anti-political understanding of critical thinking suggests that claims about institutionalized anti-Muslim racism are a sign of ‘vulnerable’ cognition because the existence of institutionalized racism within (and as a function of) liberal political order is unthinkable, and nothing can be unthinkable in a non-tyrannical system. As Morefield (2019: 191) argues, liberal theories of justice tend to distract from liberal states’ and the liberal international order’s ‘extensive histories of illiberal behaviours’ by shifting the focus back to their ‘liberal pedigree’. A constant shifting of the focus to the ethnoclass’s Others’ supposed lack of thinking capacity similarly distracts from present injustice. Contestation of counter-terrorism structures and the harm they inflict on (those perceived as) Muslims is delayed by reframing dissent as the misperceptions of the cognitively vulnerable. Since the ‘sense’ of unfair treatment cannot be taken seriously as a critical assessment of the political order, counter-extremism dismisses it as a symptom of underdeveloped thinking in need of education.

Conclusion

Counter-extremism demands an urgent rethinking of critical thinking, because its unexceptional understanding of critical thinking enables its racialization of Muslims. Its vision of critical thinking is historically conditioned by the collaboration between the powerful and mutually-reinforcing discourses of liberal education and racializing psychology. Counter-extremism cements anti-Muslim racism through this vision, imagining vulnerability through terms like ‘black and white thinking’ (in opposition to critical thinking). The supposed propensity of the Other for extremism fosters skepticism toward their ability to participate in politics without due education and psychological development. Having sketched counter-extremism’s production of the Other as a vulnerable cognitive subject, I want to stress three conclusions.

First, neither the ‘scientific’ metrics of cognition drawn from psychological expertise nor educational values with a ‘liberal pedigree’ should be left unquestioned by virtue of claims to objectivity or universal moral value. Whilst the moral value of critical thinking and ‘cognitive development’ are often taken for granted in liberal institutions, standards of healthy cognition and the promotion of ‘better thinking’ are conditioned by colonial histories. The historical influence of psychology as an authoritative science of race is a condition of possibility for the current counter-extremist discourse on cognitive development. This continuity alerts us to how terms like ‘black and white thinking’ have been wielded to constitute racial hierarchy and thereby exclude from being fully human or human at all. Whiteness continues to depict itself through a unique capacity for ‘balanced’ and critical thought (Abu-Bakare, 2022), and to over-represent this characterization as the only way of being properly human. ‘Liberal belief’ (Morefield, 2019) in the normative educational value of critical thinking has developed in conjunction with the project of securing the dominant ethnoclass by universalizing its terms for being human. Therefore, an exclusive focus on exceptional uses of psychology and education in counter-extremism is untenable and dangerous.

Second, when the norm of critical thinking is thus questioned, it becomes clear that pursuing critical thinking in a historical vacuum risks complicity in the over-representation of the dominant genre of being and its, in W.E.B. Du Bois’s terms, global color line. Educational counter-extremism reminds us that critical thinking as the endpoint of psychological and political development is a convention of the dominant genre of being. It can therefore tell us about how the genre institutes itself – how the sociogenic principle works. Critical thinking is presented as a characteristic and prerogative of the dominant ethnoclass and as a criterion for being properly human by the organizing principle of the current counter-extremist order. The conventions of a genre often have, to borrow from Jameson (1981: 79), ‘the function of inventing imaginary or formal “solutions” to unresolvable social contradictions’. The convention of educating those deemed vulnerable to develop their capacity for critical thinking invents a ‘solution’ to the following contradiction: a political order that presents itself as legitimately committed to human rights, freedom, and equality but is at the same time resistant to recognizing those outside the dominant ethnoclass as capable of thought and therefore fully human, or human at all. Counter-extremism’s framework of promoting ‘cognitive skills’ then ‘resolves’ this contradiction by framing political exclusions as pre-political care, done in the interest of preparing the Other, who is not yet ready for being properly human, for politics. This ‘solution’ prevents the polity’s ability to question the contradiction of casting ‘black and white thinking’ as a marker of ‘cognitive vulnerability’ while racial hierarchies continue to be instituted through thoroughly ‘unbalanced’ structures.

Finally, we should consider how to navigate these conditions of possibility that facilitate the dominance of an educational approach to counter-extremism. This is necessary if we hope to keep pursuing the principle of critical thinking as a means of achieving political and social justice. The counter-extremist framework of measuring critical thinking to assess vulnerability to extremism supports the habit of forgetting that goes hand in hand with unquestioning belief in the moral superiority of liberal order and its dominant way of being human. For example, while the discussed research centre’s pilot presents the ‘situation’ that supposedly makes Muslims vulnerable to extremist thinking as that of ‘rapid globalization’, its report has little to say about the historical relations between those who are marginalized by and those who benefit from the movements involved in this situation. Contra this habit, thinking critically should be contingent on thinking historically and relationally about the conceptions we take to be commonplace – including those of critical thinking. As the concept of sociogeny suggests, thinking critically about critical thinking necessitates thinking about the term’s past and present as an organizing principle in the dominant genre’s criteria for being human, without discounting inconvenient continuities.

Re-thinking the role of critical thinking as a convention of the dominant genre of being, for example, alerts us to the fact that it is not enough to raise the alarms about counter-extremism’s casting of Muslims as ‘cognitively vulnerable’. We must question the underlying ableist and carceral context that renders this construction of Muslims a convincing reason for increased policing, surveillance, detention, deportation – a context wherein a supposed lack of ‘critical thinking’ indicates psychological ‘vulnerability’ or illness and wherein mental illness and cognitive disability are assumed to necessitate carceral intervention (see also Puar, 2017: 26–28). Therefore, we need to move beyond arguing that Muslims are being treated ‘as if they are all mentally ill’ without questioning the logic that makes the treatment under question acceptable towards anyone. By paying attention to psychology’s influence as the facilitating race science of counter-extremism, we can bring the topic of how race and disability constitute a ‘mutual project of human exclusion’ (Patel, 2014: 203; Snyder and Mitchell, 2006) back to the centre of conversations on counter-extremism and anti-Muslim racism. By reconsidering the role of critical thinking as it is commonly imagined in this project of exclusion, we keep the co-constituting nature of race and disability in shaping and securing the dominant genre of being human in focus.

It is necessary to think critically about the histories and socio-political relations that enable the practice of prescribing ‘educational development’ with varying degrees of violence to those who do not think in the ‘right’ way. Educational counter-extremism shows that, unexpectedly, today’s dominant ideal of critical thinking can dangerously preclude political struggle against a limited understanding of being fully human. Our critical thinking then cannot pause at the task of reimagining critical thought.