Organizing Against Violent Extremism
December 13, 2018
As an ‘expert contribution’ to the 2018 Global Terrorism Index,
the Prevention Project’s Eric Rosand, explores the growth in multi-agency, multi-disciplinary referral mechanisms for preventing and countering violent extremism, focusing on lessons learned in this promising area of practice, where the “whole of society” approach has had some success in being operationalized.
By: Eric Rosand, Rebecca Skellett
21 October 2018
Editor’s Note: Counterterrorism is usually a national government concern, but much of the day to day of radicalization occurs in local towns and neighborhoods. However, integrating local actors into programs to prevent and counter violent extremism is often done poorly or not at all. This may be changing. Eric Rosand of the Prevention Project (and a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings) and Rebecca Skellett of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue describe the progress being made around the globe, highlighting what other countries are doing to incorporate local actors into their programs to fight extremism and drawing lessons for moving forward.
Daniel Byman
25 September 2018
New York
The Global Center on Cooperative Security, the Prevention Project: Organizing Against Violent Extremism (Prevention Project) and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) hosted a side-event on “Enhancing Global-Local Cooperation in Multi-Disciplinary P/CVE Efforts” during the 73rd Session of the UN General Assembly. The 25 September event was informed by a closed-door experts’ workshop held the previous day. The experts’ recommendations on how to strengthen multi-disciplinary P/CVE efforts and collaboration between national and local actors to enable more innovative, locally-owned solutions to emerge global stakeholders were presented at the conclusion of the side-event. They are available here.
Participants in the side-event included representatives from civil society organizations (CSOs), sub-national authorities, local police, researchers, as well as officials from national governments and the United Nations. The discussions focused on key ingredients and barriers to a) successful multi-disciplinary and other locally-led P/CVE approaches; b) national and sub-national governments facilitating more locally-led P/CVE innovations; and c) strengthening collaboration between national and local and other sub-national stakeholders.
By Eric Rosand, Emily Winterbotham, Michael Jones, Franziska Praxl-Tabuchi
24 September 2018
This report builds on the Prevention Project’s December 2016 report, “Communities First: A Blueprint for Organizing and Sustaining a Global Movement against Violent Extremism,” and is informed by a series of consultations with scores of governmental and non-governmental P/CVE stakeholders over the past 18 months. It takes stock of the progress and challenges in advancing the “whole of society” P/CVE agenda, which picked up considerable political momentum in 2015, and concludes with a series of practical, policy-relevant recommendations for enhancing its impact.
The report concludes that understanding the current ‘state-of-play’ in the P/CVE space, including a critical appraisal of its strengths and weaknesses and the comparative advantages of the various stakeholders, is necessary for developing practical guidance that can consolidate progress to-date and overcome some of the barriers to enable durable success going forward.
24 September 2018
New York City
On 24 September 2018, the Prevention Project: Organizing Against Violent Extremism, the Global Center on Cooperative Security, and the Royal United Services Institute hosted a roundtable discussion on Enhancing Global-Local Cooperation in Multi-Disciplinary P/CVE Efforts. Participants included civil society actors, local practitioners, researchers, and other experts from Australia, Canada, Jordan, Kenya, Nigeria, Serbia, Tunisia and elsewhere. A series of recommendations emerged from this roundtable that were presented during the public, high-level “side-event” on the same topic the following day.