Navigating Support and Control in Extremism Prevention: Practitioner Identities and Dilemmas Across Institutional Contexts

The sociopolitical contexts of extremism prevention have been widely studied, yet less attention has been paid to the interpretation, experience, and enactment of prevention policies by practitioners at the street level. Moving beyond policy analyses, this paper examines the ways in which prevention practitioners navigate the tension between support and control in their everyday work and the implications of these negotiations for their professional identities. Prevention professionals such as social workers and teachers are commonly associated with a logic of support focused on individual well-being. However, preventive and pedagogical practices inevitably incorporate elements of social control, particularly in contexts marked by heightened security and risk governance. To conceptualize this interplay, the paper introduces a framework capturing different configurations of support and control in so-called soft extremism prevention. This field usually comprises social workers, counsellors, and educators employed in civil society organizations or institutional settings. Empirically, the study adopts a comparative case study design, examining prevention programs in schools—typically framed as support-oriented environments—and prisons, where preventive work unfolds within more explicitly discipline-oriented institutional settings. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with practitioners in Germany, the analysis explores ethical, legal, professional, and personal dilemmas emerging across these contrasting contexts. Identity Process Theory is employed as a theoretical lens to illuminate practitioners’ strategies for managing perceived threats to professional identity, including efforts to preserve coherence, continuity, self-esteem, distinctiveness, and self-efficacy. The findings highlight recurring tensions related to trust-building, legitimacy, role expectations, confidentiality, and the normative assumptions underpinning decisions about target groups. These dynamics reveal the ongoing balancing of care- and control-oriented demands through which practitioners sustain a sense of professional integrity, even when institutional expectations remain ambiguous or conflicting. By foregrounding practitioner perspectives, the study contributes to political-psychological debates on democratic strain and repair, demonstrating how practitioners experience and negotiate the moral and psychological demands of extremism prevention within educational and punitive institutions. While the analysis is limited to practitioners’ accounts of prevention effects, future research should incorporate the perspectives of target groups to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the lived experience of support and control in extremism prevention.