Mitigating or exacerbating the root causes of violence?: critically analysing the role of USAID in terrorism prevention

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2009, a USAID-commissioned report examined the social, economic, and personal contexts that have incited political violence, such as military intervention, economic deprivation, the denial of civil rights, and repeated foreign interference. Although the report acknowledges how these formative contexts give rise to violence, the psychologising language of extremism has led to USAID’s development of antiterrorism approaches aimed at interrupting the psychological, cultural, and theological pathologies perceived to be located within individual actors, rather than the material conditions that incite armed resistance. This article explores how the concept of terrorist radicalisation has informed antiterrorism programming undertaken by the development sector and has exacerbated, not mitigated, the root causes of political violence in Somalia and the Somali diaspora. Given these outcomes, I offer concluding thoughts on how we might recentre the material conditions in which violence circulates to consider alternative approaches to violence prevention efforts in the development sector.