Periodic Reporting for period 2 - PREVEX (Preventing Violent Extremism in the Balkans and the MENA: Strengthening Resilience in Enabling Environments)
Reporting period: 2021-01-01 to 2023-06-30
While the EU has revised its counterterrorism policies several times since 2001, the destructive impact of violent extremism continues to take its toll, generating negative shocks across international borders. Focusing on the broader MENA region and the Balkans, the overarching objective of PREVEX is, therefore, to present more fine-tuned and effective approaches to preventing violent extremism through strengthening societal resilience. To achieve this, PREVEX asked the fundamental question – why some communities are more likely to experience violent extremism than others. Answering this question is essential for formulating effective preventive EU approaches that can strengthen societal resilience against violent extremism. The innovation that this question entails is further underscored by the fact that the whole violent extremism literature has been biased toward the manifestation of the phenomena of violent extremism – where it occurs and what groups that are responsible for these acts of violence This has created a blind spot as it has led to a neglect of the considerable resilience to violent extremist ideas and groups that exist even in the most enabling environments worldwide. Most people are not radicalised, and this is also the case for the areas of the world that contains some of what, according to the literature, are among the world’s most enabling environments for violent extremist ideas to thrive and gain social traction. This approach and the findings that it has generated, therefore has huge and tangible consequences for how P/CVE policies and programs should be designed and implemented. The focus on non-occurrence of violent extremism in enabling environments is a potential game-changer in the EU’s P/CVE approach.
To arrive at answers to the fundamental, but also ambitious question of why some communities are more likely to experience violent extremism than others, we had to focus on the non-occurrence side of the equation. To do this PREVEX needed to combine novelty in conceptual work on concepts and methods while at the same time establishing a sound methodology for fieldwork and data gathering.
This was proceeded by a detailed mapping of the EU and key member states procedures, programs, and policies in this field. Subsequently, PREVEX conducted a thorough mapping of the EU and other key external stakeholders’ policies towards preventing violent extremism in the Balkans, in North Africa and the Sahel, and in the Middle East. Based on these findings, PREVEX turned its attention to detailed ethnographic fieldwork in the Balkans, North Africa, the Sahel, and the Middle East. Robust ethnographic approaches were combined with experimental survey designs and respondent-driven sampling techniques. While we worked in the field, we simultaneously organised seminars in the case study countries to share preliminary results and gain feedback from local resource persons in relevant national ministries, NGOs, and staff from foreign delegations. The final comparative work enabled us to tease out conceptual conclusions whose relevance range from urban centres in the Balkans to peri-urban areas of the Middle East and North Africa to the peripheries of the Sahel.
This was proceeded by a detailed mapping of the EU and key member states procedures, programs, and policies in this field. Subsequently, PREVEX conducted a thorough mapping of the EU and other key external stakeholders’ policies towards preventing violent extremism in the Balkans, in North Africa and the Sahel, and in the Middle East. Based on these findings, PREVEX turned its attention to detailed ethnographic fieldwork in the Balkans, North Africa, the Sahel, and the Middle East. Robust ethnographic approaches were combined with experimental survey designs and respondent-driven sampling techniques. While we worked in the field, we simultaneously organised seminars in the case study countries to share preliminary results and gain feedback from local resource persons in relevant national ministries, NGOs, and staff from foreign delegations. The final comparative work enabled us to tease out conceptual conclusions whose relevance range from urban centres in the Balkans to peri-urban areas of the Middle East and North Africa to the peripheries of the Sahel.
PREVEX’ research offers not only the first systematic comparison of violent extremism and the efforts to prevent it across the Balkans, North Africa, the Sahel, and the Middle East, but also included an innovative focus on occurrence and non-occurrence of violent extremism in enabling environments. This has cast much needed light on what has been previously overlooked, namely why some communities are much more resilient to violent extremism than others. PREVEX therefore started out asking the fundamental question – why some communities are more likely to experience violent extremism than others. What we found is that even in the most enabling environments where all the factors that supposedly are conducive to violent extremism are present, most people are not radicalised. Through fine-grained empirical analyses on the ground, in our case, countries in the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa and the Sahel, we find that most people seek to shy away from such ideas and the groups that promotes them. In subtle ways, many seek to resist, and some even openly take huge risks in doing so. This suggests that the level of social resilience, in fact is remarkably high even under very dire circumstances, and the basis of this resilience can, based on our case studies, be summed up as follows:
• a tradition of religious moderation and social tolerance, and
• this tradition is supported by local leaders who are seen by local community members as trustworthy and relatively uncorrupted, and
• these leaders continue to be able to deliver something that matters to the local community.
If these three factors are present, it creates a glue in society that constitutes a significant defence against violent extremist ideas. It is important to support such local leaders that we in PREVEX have defined as ‘agents of local resilience’, but this support must be extremely light-footprinted. The reason for this is that they must be their own agents of resilience, it will not work if they become the visible agents of an external intervention. In all the areas studied by PREVEX, the states, often supported by external actors, have initiated measures to prevent radicalisation and combat violent extremism. Unfortunately, we often find that they are counter-productive due to their lack of context-sensitivity and a tailormade approach that fails to consider existing local resilience. PREVEX’s research in the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa and the Sahel also shows that the journey into violent extremist insurgencies rarely starts with religious conviction or ideological motivation but is based on genuine material grievances about lack of economic opportunities, education, employment, and basic security. This has important implications for how we should think about P/CVE programming in the future. If radicalisation is not the reason why people join such movements, more focus needs to be directed to the core causes that lead people into a journey to violent extremist groups.
• a tradition of religious moderation and social tolerance, and
• this tradition is supported by local leaders who are seen by local community members as trustworthy and relatively uncorrupted, and
• these leaders continue to be able to deliver something that matters to the local community.
If these three factors are present, it creates a glue in society that constitutes a significant defence against violent extremist ideas. It is important to support such local leaders that we in PREVEX have defined as ‘agents of local resilience’, but this support must be extremely light-footprinted. The reason for this is that they must be their own agents of resilience, it will not work if they become the visible agents of an external intervention. In all the areas studied by PREVEX, the states, often supported by external actors, have initiated measures to prevent radicalisation and combat violent extremism. Unfortunately, we often find that they are counter-productive due to their lack of context-sensitivity and a tailormade approach that fails to consider existing local resilience. PREVEX’s research in the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa and the Sahel also shows that the journey into violent extremist insurgencies rarely starts with religious conviction or ideological motivation but is based on genuine material grievances about lack of economic opportunities, education, employment, and basic security. This has important implications for how we should think about P/CVE programming in the future. If radicalisation is not the reason why people join such movements, more focus needs to be directed to the core causes that lead people into a journey to violent extremist groups.