Managing Extremism

Chapter 2 examines how risk becomes the organizing logic of contemporary counter-terrorism and Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). It traces the move from Beck’s “risk society” and Giddens’s “calculative outlook” to governmentality, showing how crime is reframed as a population risk to be managed. This reframing culminates in the New Penology and the diffusion of actuarial justice, where aggregated profiles and risk-assessment tools promise control while reconfiguring accountability. The chapter situates CVE within this actuarial turn: A hybrid domain that inherits counter-terrorism’s futurity and the welfare state’s assessment logics, rendering “radicalization” governable through individualized risk assessments and structured professional judgment. Engaging debates around Risk-Need-Responsivity tools, it shows how inclusionary rhetoric coexists with exclusionary effects, feedback loops, and a politics of efficiency that privileges management over care. The chapter argues that risk practices are performative—feigning precision while extending surveillance—and that Quebec’s CVE field exemplifies this cross-pollination of high policing and psychosocial intervention. This framework positions the ethnographic analysis that follows, clarifying how practitioners interpret, adapt, and at times resist these risk technologies in everyday work.