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.
