Venue: Online
Date: Tuesday, 1 February 2022
Time: 18:00
Historically, football has been an arena for rivalries to play out. Charged, alcohol-fuelled and with a predominantly male following, football games, at both a club and national level, have been fertile ground for social divisions as well as social bonds. The latest survey conducted by YouGov in 2021, revealed that sixty two percent of match-attending fans feared a player would be racially abused at a game and a further seventy-three per cent of ethnically diverse fans were concerned about racial abuse in stadiums. Social media platforms, as anonymity-awarding spaces are also facilitating the spread of hatred online, as seen after England's loss in the Euro 2020 final when three black-British players were subjected to abhorrent abuse on Twitter and Instagram.
But, in an age where football is the most diverse it has ever been, where some of the best English footballing talents are of mixed ethnicity and when there is a multicultural trend in club and international European football, why is it that xenophobia, anti-Semitism, hooliganism and Islamophobia continue to prevail?
Dialogue Society is pleased to announce a six-part online panel series “A Spatial Analysis of Extremism in a UK Context” to examine some of the key and complex issues the UK faces from pre-existing and emerging forms of radicalisation and extremism in spaces across our society. In 2019, the UK saw 67 far-right terror attacks and plots, compared with 7 in France and 3 in Germany. These attacks were the highest recorded number in Europe. With growing concern over increasing hatred, radicalisation, and extremism in the UK; from prisons to schools, online and offline platforms, the threat of extremism has shown that it knows no geographical, ethnic, age, social, or religious boundaries. Extremist acts pose a threat to the cohesion of communities in Britain and raise questions about the effects that these acts will have on changing or even restricting the nature of British democracy.
Using case studies of pre-existing and emerging forms of extremism across society, this panel series expects to answer through dialogue the following questions:
This panel series will build on the Dialogue Society’s previous works on extremism and radicalisation.
The first panel in the series “The challenges of defining and perceiving extremism in a UK context” will firstly review and evaluate the current definition of extremism proposed by the UK Government, before policies on combatting extremism are introduced and evaluated for their efficacy.
The following next three panels focus on pre-existing, emerging, or changing forms of extremism in football, climate change activism, and prisons. These panels will review and evaluate relevant policies and methods adopted by the Government to address the new forms of extremism in new or changing spaces. They will also discuss whether the government’s current definition of extremism is adequate for addressing these trends.
Lastly, the online dimension to extremism, used as both a primary or faciliatory method to carrying out extremism will be unpacked before the challenges of legislating and regulating these mediums are outlined.
Reflections and recommendations will be submitted from our panellists in each panel.
The culmination of this series will be the writing and publication of a policy paper using the interdisciplinary discussions raised by our experts.
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