Enhancing Civil Society Engagement

Following the first UN High-Level Conference of Heads of Counter-Terrorism Agencies of Member States in June 2018, the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT) organized seven regional high-level conferences to “keep up the momentum on key counter-terrorism issues … strengthen international cooperation … [and] pro¬mote implementation of the [United Nations] Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy and relevant General Assembly and Security Council resolutions.” To help bolster civil society engagement as part of that process, UNOCT partnered with the Global Center to organize two one-day, civil society–led workshops preceding the last two regional conferences, in Abu Dhabi on 17 December 2019 and Vienna on 10 February 2020.

This paper summarizes the key outcomes of those discussions. It highlights some of the contributions of civil society to advance implementation of the Strategy in the areas of prevention, intervention, and rehabilitation and reintegration. It identifies challenges and proposes a series of recommendations for states, intergovernmental bodies, and civil society to enhance engagement on counterterrorism and preventing violent extremism by 1) creating an enabling environment for civil society, 2) supporting its financial and organizational capacity, and 3) engaging it in relevant policy formulation and implementation processes at all levels.

In the lead up to the 2020 Virtual UN Counter-Terrorism Week, the Global Center launched the summary findings and key recommendations of the fifth iteration of its Blue Sky report series. With the generous support of the governments of the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, the report builds on the Global Center’s previous analyses of the UN’s counter terrorism efforts. The key recommendations of the report suggest concrete ways the United Nations can better leverage its comparative advantages to improve policy development, inter-agency coordination, delivery, and impact of counterterrorism and preventing violent extremism efforts in a manner that systemically accounts for human rights and civil society engagement.

The Global Center’s Executive Director Eelco Kessels and Chief of Strategy Melissa Lefas were joined by Assistant Secretary-General Michèle Coninsx, Executive Director, UN Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate; Mr. Raffi Gregorian, Deputy to the Under-Secretary-General and Director, UN Office of Counter-Terrorism; Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism; Professor Willibroad Dze-Ngwa, University of Yaoundé I, Africa Network against Illiteracy, Conflict and Human Rights Abuse, Cameroon; and Ms. Mai E’Leimat, Founder and CEO of Edmaaj, Development and Social Responsibility Consulting, Jordan. Ambassador Stephan Husy, Ambassador-at-Large for International Counterterrorism, Switzerland opened the event and Mr. Huib Mijnarends, Special Envoy on Counter-Terrorism, the Netherlands, delivered closing remarks.

Recognizing the importance of reinforcing the promotion and protection of human rights and the rule of law underpinning the Strategy and that the United Nations places a renewed focus on policy leadership and coordination to support the Strategy’s implementation, embedded in the wider peace and security pillar, Blue Sky V hones in on four focus areas:

• Calibrating the UN Counterterrorism Architecture
• Situating UN Counterterrorism Efforts Within the Prevention Framework
• Engaging and Supporting Civil Society and Mainstream Human Rights
• Assessing the Implementation of the Strategy

The panelists reflected on the report’s summary findings and recommendations, joined by over 175 participants via Zoom and YouTube livestream.

For more information about the Blue Sky process and report, please contact Ms. Franziska Praxl at fpraxl@globalcenter.org.

This report contains a comparative evaluation of national strategies to prevent and counter violent extremism, to explore how they reflect recommendations and good practices outlined by the United Nations. Drawing upon a sample of 19 national strategies, the report analyzes the procedures and standards of policy planning that underpin the development of countries’ strategies. Using the guidelines of the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism’s “Reference Guide: Developing National and Regional Action Plans to Prevent Violent Extremism” as a common analytical framework, the report is organized around the six procedural components outlined therein as essential in developing inclusive, context-specific, and robust national strategies.

Based on this comparative analysis, the report provides a number of recommendations related to each of the six procedural components analyzed. It is hoped that these recommendations will help guide countries as they develop new or optimize existing strategies in line with international norms and common standards of promising practice and in turn design more effective national strategies to prevent and counter violent extremism.

History offers plenty of examples of female involvement in political violence, but a certain fascination and disbelief continue to surround female violent extremists because women are often still viewed as homemakers and mothers, surprising society by the number of young girls and women joining the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. This policy brief explores the drivers of radicalization to and engagement in violent extremism and the factors of disengagement and desistance among women and girls by examining cases of individuals that went through the United Kingdom’s Channel program. Channel cases were chosen for this analysis because it is one of the longest running (since 2007) and most documented early intervention programs developed specifically to prevent engagement with terrorism and violent extremism. It aims to enhance understanding of gender-sensitive interventions that address the specific needs of women and girls. Recommendations include the focus on mechanisms for women and men to claim their rights and have their grievances heard while ensuring accountability mechanisms are in place and the need to more effectively combine online and offline preventing and countering violent extremism actions.

Over the past decade, security actors in Kenya and the international community have increasingly viewed young people in Kenya’s Muslim communities as vectors for radicalization to violent extremism. A number of large scale economic development assistance programs in the country, even as they promote the intense free market entrepreneurialism that continues to leave the vast majority of Kenyans behind, are also increasingly taking on preventing violent extremism objectives. Against the backdrop of heightened international and domestic concerns over the vulnerability of Kenyan youth to violent extremism, this policy brief focuses on the hardships and priorities of youth in Kenya through the voices of young people themselves. Drawing on a series of focus group discussions conducted by the Kenya Community Support Centre in September 2018, the paper explores the daily challenges confronting young people in Mombasa County as they struggle to make ends meet in the face of joblessness, wage theft, nepotism, and political corruption. While the serious threat posed by al-Shabaab cannot be ignored, the paper argues that the overriding drive to prevent violent extremism among Kenyan youth, especially in Muslim and Somali communities, is not only disproportionate but also counterproductive, threatening to overshadow the overwhelming need for economic justice, governance accountability, and reform.

Structural factors that can fuel support for violent extremism, like corrupt governance and inequality, are often intertwined with individual-level vulnerability factors, such as a search for identity or a need for quick answers to issues of injustice. Under these circumstances, individuals can be drawn to black-and-white answers that seem to offer simplicity, clarity, and certainty. Unfortunately, a hallmark of violent extremist ideologies is this binary thinking, stripped of complexity and with an identifiable in-group/out-group dynamic that offers a sense of community and belonging to help people make sense of the world. As policymakers and practitioners work to address the larger structural factors fueling violent extremism, psychological interventions may help address the binary construct of thinking that can make violent extremist ideologies sound appealing at the individual level. This policy brief explore the concept of integrative complexity – an empirical, peer-reviewed, and cross-culturally validated measure of the complexity of thinking – and the ways it can be applied in contexts of violent extremism and other instances of intergroup conflict.

The Compendium of Good Practices in the Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Violent Extremist Offenders presents good and promising practices in the rehabilitation and reintegration of violent extremist offenders (VEOs) in correctional settings, while also discussing how practices related to prison regime, security, intelligence, and risk assessment can impact these two processes. The compilation endeavors to (1) inform understanding and improve decision-making regarding the implementation of approaches for the rehabilitation and reintegration of VEOs, specifically in the correctional services of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, although it has value in other jurisdictions; (2) integrate established with emerging promising practices in this field; (3) translate key existing documents into an applied and accessible resource for use by various stakeholders; and (4) include good and promising practices associated with women, juveniles, and foreign fighters convicted of terrorism offenses, and prison and probation services where issues associated with violent extremism may be less frequent.

 

This policy brief explores the oft-under examined question of state-perpetrated violence and its treatment within the global preventing and countering violence extremism (PCVE) agenda. While there has been a gradual recognition that human rights, good governance and human security are critical factors in violence prevention, PCVE policy and programming continues to focus on addressing only violence associated with specific radical ideas and is overwhelming centered on individuals and communities of particular identity groups. This agenda often obscures and disregards substantial levels of violence perpetrated by states and other actors.

Against the backdrop of growing body of work highlighting the biases, inconsistencies and assumptions of mainstream radicalization theory over the past decade, a paradigm shift is long overdue. To that end, this policy brief highlights the intersections of political violence, violent extremism, and human insecurity through a series of thematic vignettes on corruption, human rights abuses, and war-making. illustrating ways in which state conduct plays a central role in manifesting or escalating political violence from which violent extremism and terrorism emerge. Recognizing the scale and magnitude of state-perpetrated violence and its role in manifesting further violence is essential for charting a new course toward a more holistic response to violent extremism that adequately accounts for and responds to a wider spectrum of political violence, including the violence perpetrated by states.

Violent extremism is a key issue on the regional security agenda in East Africa. However, our review of the relevant literature, complemented by original primary research, suggests that the evidentiary baseline regarding violent extremism in East Africa is modest. The existing literature focuses largely on Somalia and Kenya and serves to underscore that mobilization to extremist violence in the region is diverse. These findings have important implications for development actors seeking to advance “countering violent extremism” (or sometimes “preventing violent extremism”) measures in East Africa. Those measures should be variegated across the states in the region. More generally, development actors seeking to advance countering violent extremism measures in East Africa or elsewhere should ensure that their approaches are evidence-based, responsive to the problems they are designed to address, proportional in light of existing development and security priorities, and effective.

The research for this article was conducted as part of the Global Center’s program to produce a rigorous literature review of drivers of radicalization and extremism in Eastern Africa under the East Africa Research Fund of the UK Department for International Development.

This article was published in African Security Volume 11, Issue 2 (2018) pp. 160-180.

Multilateral development actors have recently embraced the ‘PVE’ (preventing violent extremism) agenda. This includes consideration of PVE measures in countries like Uganda, where interpretations of non-state violence are contested and where the government has a history of strategic rent-seeking behavior regarding counter-terrorism assistance. This article assesses the threat of terrorism and violent extremism in Uganda. We argue against a strategic reorientation towards PVE among development actors. Current and emerging threats do not justify a departure from existing development priorities. Importantly, consideration of the political context pertaining to PVE in Uganda commends a cautious approach.

The research for this article was conducted as part of the Global Center’s program to produce a rigorous literature review of drivers of radicalization and extremism in Eastern Africa under the East Africa Research Fund of the UK Department for International Development.

This article was published in Conflict, Security & Development Volume 18, Issues 2 (2018) pp. 159-179.