This special issue offers a critical examination of current approaches to ‘countering’ violent extremism and explores alternative approaches to understanding and addressing the related challenges and dynamics at their sources.
These alternatives aim to prevent and transform violent extremism through research, policy and practice at the intersection of peacebuilding, governance and development.
Violent extremisms of all varieties are driven by complex configurations of historical, political, economic, cultural, social and psychological factors. Yet the urgency of responding to the threats posed by violent extremism has resulted in theories and practices that are predominantly state-centric and security-based. This results in interventions that tend to focus on responding to the short-term consequences (terrorist attacks) rather than transforming the long-term (historical and systemic) causes and dynamics of violent extremisms.
While the causes of violent extremism are multiplex, requiring multi-levelled and multi-sectoral responses, disciplinary blinders often hamper theoreticians seeking to understand the phenomenon, and policy-maker action is often constrained by bureaucratic stovepipes. The theories and practices from the fields of peacebuilding and conflict transformation, alternatively, emphasise analysing root and proximate causes,
parties and dynamics, and multi-disciplinary, multi-sectoral (or horizontal), and multi-levelled (or vertical) strategic responses. As such they have much to offer scholars, policy-makers and practitioners seeking to more effectively understand and address violent extremism
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PEACEBUILDING_APPROACHES_TO_PREVENTING_AND_TRANSFORMING_VIOLENT_EXTREMISM_.pdf
