Radicalisation and the jurisprudence of suspicion: law’s pre-criminal turn and the collapse of evidentiary thresholds in the UK, France and Germany

Radicalisation is one of the most rhetorically saturated yet legally indeterminate concepts in contemporary counterterrorism. This article reframes it not as a behavioural process but as a jurisprudence of suspicion: a juridical logic that anticipates threat, displaces evidentiary thresholds, and transforms identity into liability. Through a comparative analysis of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, it shows how distinct traditions converge on a pre-criminal paradigm: the UK's Prevent Duty under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 and cases such as R (Butt) v Secretary of State and Begum v Secretary of State; France's absorption of emergency powers via SILT (2017) and the Separatism Law (2021) enabling dissolutions including BarakaCity and CCIF; and Germany's wehrhafte Demokratie, legitimating expulsions and surveillance under the Residence Act and Federal Administrative Court jurisprudence. Combining doctrinal analysis, critical discourse analysis, and comparative method-and engaging Zedner's preventive justice, Bigo's ban-opticon, and postcolonial critiques-the article makes three contributions: it identifies the collapse of criminal-law categories into suspicion; demonstrates cross-system convergence on anticipatory governance; and advances a jurisprudence of constraint grounded in evidence, proportionality, and rights protection.