Between security and belonging: state policy on religious extremism, political values and the politics of identity

State responses to religious extremism do not unfold in a political vacuum. They are shaped by, and in turn reshape, the constellation of political values that a given polity holds dear—liberty, security, equality, tolerance, and national cohesion—as well as the identities through which citizens and officials make sense of those values. This article examines the reciprocal relationship between counter-extremism policy, political values, and collective identity. Drawing on comparative case analysis of six countries (United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Kazakhstan, Morocco, and the United States), in which primary legislative documents and official policy programs constitute the core evidential base, triangulated against quantitative survey data (WVS, V-Dem, GTI) for contextual characterization, and comparative evidence from Western Europe, Central Asia, and North America, we argue that the design and legitimation of anti-extremism frameworks is fundamentally a value-laden process in which states negotiate tensions between liberal commitments to religious freedom and security imperatives, while simultaneously constructing—and contesting—narratives about who belongs to the political community. The comparative analysis shows that value-dominant contexts—distinguished along the emancipative versus survival orientation axis—are systematically associated with divergent policy architectures, and that coercive securitization models are linked, across all examined cases, to greater community alienation and diminished cooperation with state institutions when compared with prevention-through-integration approaches. We further argue that the identitarian dimension of counter-extremism policy has been underexplored in comparative perspective—specifically, the interaction between political values, collective identity, and policy design across different institutional contexts, and that attending to it illuminates why technically similar measures produce divergent social outcomes across different political contexts. The findings carry implications for democratic governance, minority rights, and the legitimacy of the liberal state.