The clearest marker of a new phase is the March 2006 conference WP801 ‘Towards a Community-Based Approach to Counter Terrorism’, which stated that security and legislation can at best contain the threat of terrorism and may sometimes do more harm than good. Partners included Demos (a democracy think-tank), the Home Office Faith Community Unit, the United States Institute for Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), all of whom were contributing to a research project of the same name. The report argues that Muslim communities in the UK “can and should now provide many of the solutions,” and that a “bottom-up” or community-based approach was necessary alongside the traditional “top-down” response. The programme emphasises socio-economic context, foreign policy, media portrayals of Muslims, the use and abuse of faith, the policing of Muslim communities, institutions such as mosques, prisons and universities, and the role of public services.
The importance of the 7 July 2005 attacks (‘7/7’) is explicit in this report. It states that much of the British response after the London bombings had focused on strengthening security and legislation, but that preventing terrorism required a different approach and stronger partnership with Muslim communities. It identifies youth work, one-to-one de-radicalisation in prisons and universities, mosque outreach, women and families, local authorities, and sensitive policing as important elements of a preventive strategy. This was a major conceptual shift: radicalisation was being framed as something that had to be addressed through social relationships, local institutions, identity formation, and trust, not only through surveillance and interdiction.
The steady expansion of preventive thinking is one of the most striking long-term developments over this period. Many of the Wilton Park events from this era can be viewed through the framework of the UK’s 2003 CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy and its four pillars: Prevent, Pursue, Protect, and Prepare. Early events focus on state response, intelligence, disruption, terrorist finance, and specialist technical threats, and align with Pursue; maritime security and crowded places map strongly onto Protect; biological and chemical terrorism, civil-military coordination, crisis management, and resilience all speak to Prepare. However, the themes of community-based responses, Muslim youth, extremist discourse, strategic communications, disengagement, prisons, religion, gender, and education, show Wilton Park as a real incubator for Prevent thinking.
This development is revealed in mid-2000s material on Muslim youth and community-based CT (including WP82630 ‘Engaging with Muslim Youth in Europe and North America’, October-November 2006, organised with the USIP and Department for Communities and Local Government). The report emphasises national identity, belonging, the role of moderate mainstream Muslim voices, education, women, community organisations, and democratic participation. It also examines “resilient communities,” the relationship between integration and cohesion, and the need to address social justice and community trust. Taken alongside contemporaneous dialogues such as WP841 ‘Countering Terrorism in Europe and North America: How Can a Community Based Approach Be Developed?’ (February 2007, again with DCLG), it suggests a conscious policy move away from seeing Muslim communities primarily as sources of suspicion or intelligence-gathering, and toward seeing them as necessary partners in countering extremism and strengthening democratic resilience. These themes would be re-visited when the UK and Europe faced the prospect of its Muslim communities being targeted to join the so-called Islamic State in Syria in Iraq in the mid-2010s.
The same broadening is visible in Wilton Park’s treatment of discourse and identity beyond the UK domestic frame. Conferences on creating common platforms between Muslim and Western societies, and on understanding and engaging with diasporas (notably ‘WP883 Understanding and Engaging with Diasporas’ from December 2007), focused on shared values, media amplification, moderate religious authority, educational reform, identity, remittances, transnational politics, and women’s experiences. These events show that by the mid-2000s Wilton Park’s terrorism-adjacent work was embedding security concerns in a wider framework of dialogue, belonging, and citizenship.
During this phase, the field of event partners broadens significantly across government, reflecting the need to manage a threat that was simultaneously distant (in the Afghan-Pakistan border regions) and also home-grown (as were all of the 7/7 attackers); violent extremism was no longer contained within a single bureaucratic domain. Therefore, the Home Office – and in particular its Office for Security and Counter-terrorism (OSCT), and the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU) – HM Treasury, DCLG, ACPO, and later the National Offender Management System (NOMS) and Department for International Development (DFID) recur across these events, in addition to FCO. This suggests that Wilton Park was increasingly acting as a bridging venue among foreign policy, domestic security, policing, social cohesion, and development agendas.