Publications

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

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.

 

 

 

The following recommendations are aimed at strengthening the role of the United Nations in promoting and protecting human rights and safeguarding and expanding civil society spaces while countering terrorism and preventing violent extremism.

They were formulated by the Global Center on Cooperative Security (Global Center) and the Prevention Project: Organizing Against Violent Extremism (Prevention Project) and were informed by events hosted by the two organizations on the margins of the sixth biennial review of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy (GCTS) and High-Level Conference of Heads of Counter-Terrorism Agencies of Member States (HLC), with the support of the governments of Norway and Sweden. They also build on recommendations made in the Global Center’

s May 2018 report “Blue Sky IV: Clouds Dispersing?” and in letters sent by a coalition of civil society organizations (CSOs) to UN Secretary-General Guterres and UN Under-Secretary General to Counter-Terrorism Voronkov related to the recent reforms of the UN counterterrorism architecture.

20-21 June 2018

Oxford University

On 20-21 June 2018, the Prevention Project: Organizing Against Violent Extremism (Prevention Project) and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) hosted a workshop at the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR), University of Oxford, on Multi-Disciplinary Thinking and Innovative Action: Collaboration around the P/CVE Agenda. The event convened a group of experts from diverse fields, including mental health, urban planning, democracy promotion, human rights, peacebuilding, neuroscience, gang violence, comedy, social entrepreneurship, youth empowerment, and law enforcement. The objective was to reflect on the existing global preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE)3 agenda and identify innovative approaches to maximize its impact long-term, including understanding what works to prevent and counter violent extremism, with a focus on local level actors and implications. Participants addressed key questions and explored seminal challenges in the P/CVE
area.

They agreed that innovations are not only critical to building trust and collaboration between government stakeholders (i.e., law enforcement and non-law enforcement and national, sub-national, and local government institutions) and between government and civil society, and within civil society, in order to sustain effective P/CVE efforts but also are inevitable in order to adapt to the ever-evolving landscape. The workshop discussions will inform a report on the state of the global P/CVE agenda that the Prevention Project and RUSI will present on the margins of the high-level opening of the 73rd UN General Assembly in late September 2018 in New York.