Prevention Of Violent Extremism Research Articles

Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow: An E-Learning Program on Migration

The present study presents an e-learning platform based on the educational programs carried out by Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow Association (YTT) and Roma Tre University. YTT is an independent Paris-based Educational Humanitarian Non-Profit which combines visual language with learning tools to facilitate migrants’ and refugees’ inclusive processes, promote human-rights, the prevention of violent extremism, freedom, diverse, multi-ethnic and multi religious societies. YTT is also aimed at positively affecting national and international migration policy-making. Since 2016, YTT has been collaborating with thousands of refugees/migrants (from more than 50 nationalities, aged from 3 to 70 years old) in over 35 camps and squats across Europe/North Africa. They receive 3 sheets of paper and coloured pens and are invited to draw 3 sketches: one of their life before: Yesterday; one of their current life: Today; and one of their life imagined in the future: Tomorrow. These drawings define the YTT visual language, a raw, emotional and explicative language that speaks logically and directly to the audience. Figure 1 shows the YTT drawings by a 9 years old Iraqi girl, living in the Miksaliste Refugee Camp (Belgrade, Serbia), who represented in her Yesterday (the first on the left) which is what she saw when on a Sunday morning, coming back from church, she found both her parents and brother killed. In the Today, she drew her hands and arms with the cuts she self-inflicts on her body. In the Tomorrow, she drew her dream to be a doctor, so that she can help others.

Destabilizing stereotyped concepts in childhood: Some opportunities and risks of philosophy for children as an aid to PVE

This article explores how the philosophy for children (P4C) pedagogical model might be well positioned to support the educational strategies associated with the prevention of violent extremism, through early intervention in children’s concept development. Specifically, it considers how the stereotyping of concepts risks interfering with children’s reasoning by engendering relationally problematic views that skew what they might consider valuable, resulting in epistemic rigidity and reduced opportunities to practice responsible autonomy. In response to such risks, the article proposes promising avenues for P4C facilitation, with an aim to cultivate flexible thinking in children and thereby support their evolving competence as emerging agents.

Dealing with Frustration: A Grounded Theory Study of CVE Practitioners

Understanding how best to proceed in the prevention of violent extremism is a significant concern for researchers and practitioners. This paper draws on interviews with thirty ‘countering violent extremism’ (CVE) practitioners, using a grounded theory approach focusing on those working at grassroots level, to highlight the way in which these individuals are mining their own personal experiences in their approaches to this work. Driven by a sense of frustration with the ‘accepted wisdom’, this involves drawing on personal skills and experiences to establish themselves as credible actors, thereby carving a space for themselves within a growing CVE industry. Moving beyond anecdotal evidence using grounded theory, this paper offers a systematic analysis of the experiences of these frontline practitioners. In considering what it is that practitioners are doing, and the context that pushes them to adopt this approach, this research offers significant insights into what is actually happening in the area of practice, contributing to understandings of the prevention landscape as a whole. This paper highlights the tensions between actors operating at different levels within the CVE sphere, with discrepancies in resources and power playing a central role.

Violent Extremism, National Security and Prevention. Institutional Discourses and their Implications for Schooling

Currently, threats to societal security from extremist groups are high on the political agenda in many countries. Politicians, policymakers at various levels and communities are searching for methods to counteract recruitment to violent organizations. These efforts are often referred to as Prevention of Violent Extremism (PVE-programmes). One of the earliest PVE programmes in Europe was the British PREVENT programme, and it has to some extent served as a model for other countries, including Sweden. In this article, we scrutinize a particular method, inspired by the PREVENT, and developed by the Swedish National Coordinator against violent extremism, called The Conversation Compass (CC) intended for so-called front-line workers. This article reports an analysis of this method in order to provide a broader understanding of how the discourse on preventing violent extremism meanders from political and policy discourses into claims about how to organize educational practices and social work and the regulations under which these institutions operate. The results show that the CC contributes to a securitization of the educational system in ways that are not in line with educational traditions of schools in Sweden, or with the laws and policies that regulate the educational system.

Caught between the urgent and the comprehensible: professionals’ understanding of violent extremism

ABSTRACTThe present article focuses on how 13 professionals in key organisations in Sweden – all commissioned to design social and pedagogical efforts to prevent recruitment to terror groups that commit violence in the name of Islam – understand and reason regarding the root causes of recruitment and possible measures to counteract it. The 13 informants’ reasoning is analysed through critical discourse analysis, the aim being to investigate discursive practices that influence the construction of a Swedish discourse on the “prevention of violent extremism”. The analysis shows that in the informants’ reasoning, a conflict can be found between security-driven doctrines that strive to individualise the issue of “violent extremism”, and their understanding that segregation is the primary, though indirect, factor sparking “radicalisation”. This conflict seems to impair the use of a professional language to describe and talk about the practical methodology that the informants are developing.

Just a Girl

This article is based on empirical work which examined the inclusion of women and girls in the UK’s Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) agenda. It focuses specifically on a road show designed to raise the academic aspirations of Muslim girls in order to improve Muslim women’s performance in the labour market. It begins by illustrating how global development discourses of girls’ empowerment (the ‘Girl Effect’) permeate the rationale for the road shows. The article interrogates these overarching narratives through analysis of interview material and participant observation. First, it highlights the diversity amongst Muslim girls in terms of region, social class and ethnicity. Second, it interrogates the rationale for the project, addressing other factors such as discrimination which also affect Muslim women’s position in the labour market. It concludes by stressing the importance of ‘writing against culture’ and thinking intersectionality about ‘Muslim girls’, not only as Muslims but as ‘girls who are Muslim’.

Arun Kundnani (2014) The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror. London: Verso.

Martin Luther King Jr understood the link between individual violence at home and state violence abroad. In part of his message that is often downplayed, he told an audience at Riverside Church, New York in 1967 that the promotion of nonviolent direct action (or the prevention of violent extremism) among young Americans depended on opposing the violence of US foreign policy in places like Vietnam. Arun Kundnani ends his book arguing this point remains as valid today in the global war on terror. Indeed, in many ways, the material presented in the book paints a depressingly familiar picture of state secrecy and surveillance, the normalisation of preventative measures in the post-9/11 era, governments instilling fear and anxiety across populations, and the criminalisation of formerly lawful activities. It is now beyond dispute that these developments have eroded human rights and civil liberties in Western societies. But they have also impinged, more broadly, upon social relations and political processes. Not surprisingly, this has impacted Muslim communities the most because relations of trust have been eroded in the domestic war on terror. Download the PDF file from this page to read Greg Martin's complete review of Arun Kundnani's book. Download the PDF file to read the complete review of Arun Kundnan's book by Greg Martin.

Giving the silent majority a stronger voice? Initiatives to empower Muslim women as part of the UK's ‘War on Terror’

This article provides a gendered analysis of the ‘War on Terror’ in the UK context. Specifically it looks at initiatives to empower Muslim women, which were part of New Labour's Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) agenda, the impetus for which stemmed from the idea that, as ‘the silent majority’, women need to be given a ‘stronger voice’. Based on analysis of qualitative interviews, this article situates these initiatives within a broader policy landscape of debates on multiculturalism, community cohesion and Britishness. It explores interviewees' understandings of Muslim women's silence in relation to those suggested by policy discourse, considering the ways in which the state's attempt to ‘give voice’ worked in practice. I argue that the operation of such initiatives continued to constrain Muslim women's voices, restricting ‘voice’ to a narrow range of speakers speaking about a narrow range of issues.

Failed and Friendless: The UK's ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ Programme

This article suggests that Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE), the government's ‘hearts and minds’ response to the threat of domestic Islamist terrorism within the wider CONTEST strategy, has been exposed as both failed and friendless by growing political and academic scrutiny. PVE's monocultural focus on Muslims is in stark contradiction to the overriding policy goal of community cohesion, while its implementation has provoked accusations both of surveillance and of engineering ‘value changes’ within Muslim communities. Local conflicts relating to the operationalisation of PVE result from political disagreement over the balance between community engagement and policing within the Labour government, and these problems leave the future of this key anti-terrorism policy area unclear.

From one extreme to another

Theatre In Education play and production about Islamic Extremism and Far right white, received £260,000 of government PVE (Preventing Violent Extremism) money to tour schools nationally for three years.