Abstract
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.