This paper addresses questions in contemporary deradicalization efforts by focusing on three social segments of a particular society; the radicalized, the nonradicalized youth, and the host communities. In all these questions, the central themes of deradicalization and counterradicalization are envisioned in a spectrum of community-oriented programs, projects, and activities. The article uses these terminologies as a model to disengage radicalized groups from violent worldviews and to anticipate and mitigate further radicalization.
Since September 11, 2001, the world of counterterrorism has undergone a series of transformations. As a consolidation of the subsequent counterterrorism efforts, the United Nations established the Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT) and the subsidiary Counter-Terrorism Centre (CCT).
The UNOCT has five main functions:
- Provide leadership on the General Assembly counterterrorism mandates across the United Nations System.
- Enhance coordination and coherence across the 38 Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force entities to ensure the balanced implementation of the four pillars of the Strategy.
- Strengthen the delivery of United Nations counterterrorism capacity-building assistance to member states.
- Improve visibility, advocacy and resource mobilization for United Nations counterterrorism efforts.
- Prioritize counterterrorism across the United Nations System and ensure that the work to prevent violent extremism remains rooted in the Strategy.
The UNCCT supports UN member states with capacity-building programs, counterradicalization and deradicalization projects (CDRPs) and counterterrorism activities. The establishment of these initiatives reflects the global realization of the emerging prominence of radicalization across social, economic and political spheres of communities around the world. The counterterrorism initiatives these communities posit in coordination with the UNOCT and UNCCT focus on two central strategies: deradicalization and counterradicalization.
While ‘radical’ does not imply a violent ideology, CDRPs focus on challenging radical and extremist worldviews linked to violent groups. Deradicalization describes the disengagement of already-radicalized individuals or groups from violent and ideologically-oriented extremist identities. Counterradicalization is an anticipatory mechanism to preempt the negative legitimization of grievances, permeation of violent ideology, and radical mobilization.
Since their establishment in 2017, the UNOCT has assisted in the implementation of numerous CDRPs and adjacent projects. Projects include training programs to alleviate inducements to terror, increase community engagement and awareness in counterterrorism efforts, and target specific groups overlooked in counterterrorism work. For example, counterterrorism efforts exhibited blind spots to the role women and girls play in prevention initiatives. As such, the UNOCT Gender Advisors coordinated with member states to develop gender markers to improve on the quality of gender responsiveness within future efforts.
Through counter and deradicalization tactics, counterterrorism programs coopt multiple cross-sections of communities in the work of disincentivizing violence as a means of grievance solving, facilitating ideological transformation and mobilizing preexisting potential avenues of deradicalization. Specifically, CDRPs engage three essential constituencies: radicalized groups, at-risk nonradicalized youth, and host communities.
CDRPs Neutralize Radicalized Groups
Specialized targeting of radicalized groups is often the most intuitive counterterrorism tactic. Counterradicalization and deradicalization efforts against radicalized groups incur transformative benefits, such as blocking pathways for recruitment into extremist groups. One key mechanism for targeting radicalized groups are capacity-building projects dedicated to the prevention of violent extremism (PVE), including developing national and regional efforts. PVE projects entail bolstering coordination and strategic communication to national governments, civil society organizations and the UN systems. For example, UNOCT training workshops in the Maldives and Indonesia built capacity in the prevention of violent extremism as well as facilitated the rehabilitation and reintegration of the deradicalized. By providing passive barriers to radicalization, PVE-specific CDRPs break the influence of agitated worldviews.
CDRPs Influence Nonradicalized Youth
Most counterterrorism initiatives assume the radicalized should be accorded primary focus in interventions since radicalized groups are directly linked to acts of terror. However, there is still no evidence to suggest that the nonradicalized are inferior in the equation of terrorism. In fact, the nonradicalized, and especially nonradicalized youth, should be key constituents in the fight against terrorism. The nonradicalized often exist in the same material conditions that led others to radicalization and are thus susceptible to appeals towards violent extremism. Youth are of particular importance, as young adults tend to demonstrate a propensity towards radicalism at higher rates than other age groups. Counter and deradicalization efforts targeting nonradicalized youth can curtail the recruitment pipeline and provide avenues for the penetration of nonviolent worldviews. However, improperly managed measures can undermine counterterrorism initiatives by exacerbating, and radicalization.As such, both counter and deradicalization measures should not stratify the radicalized and ignore the role of those imminently prone to radicalization (e.g. nonradicalized youths).
CDRPs Equip Host Communities
In addition to the direct benefits in addressing both nonradicalized youth and radicalized groups, CDRPs inculcate counterradicalization social mores in host communities and increase the general awareness of the risks associated with extremist groups. Challenges to counterradicalization should be drawn from how individuals become radicalized. Both radicalization and deradicalization lean heavily on familial and social ties, with the internet playing an increasing role in radicalization as well as deradicalization.
Where these individualized benefits are coupled with transformed groups, there is a multiplication of benefits accrued to the communities in the form of collective charisma against terror activities. These collective benefits build an atmosphere of mounting counterterrorism measures across communities. The result is increased coordination and burden-sharing among stakeholders. This preparation and buy-in allow host communities to consciously construct their own resilience and awareness to challenge detrimental hypernationalism.
UNOCT in Social, Economic and Political Realities
CDRPs must remain sensitive to political and socioeconomic conditions that breed differentiated access to better living opportunities. With consideration to these conditions CDRPs bolster community resilience. Attentiveness to these contexts in CDRP implementation are critical to jump-starting counterterrorism approaches and for long-term purposive integration of communities.
Without governments and all stakeholders conducting robust deradicalization and counterradicalization programs, terrorists would go unchallenged in creating insecurity. Worse still, the absence of these measures would leave most prone victims of radicalization and the general community populace with ineffective security management measures. Since radicalized groups often feed into terrorists who legitimize their grievances against economic, social, and political structural inequities, CDRPs responsive to those conditions can preempt the osmosis of extremist messaging before their assimilation reaches dangerous levels.
Holistic counterterrorism strategies should focus on validating and promoting the legitimacy of nonviolent means among the most prone groups to violence and spreading this understanding across communities for normative consolidation. The positive impact accrued across the community creates a social norm that increases the understanding of the risks associated with extremism. This understanding in turn improves the security awareness levels of individual community members. This ultimately manifests in a collective community charisma against terror activities.
As these measures become more effective in marshaling counterterrorism across communities, CDRPs create self-reinforcing cycles to counter violent extremism and hypernationalism. CDPRs become tools for designing approaches and implementing checklists for the evaluation of interventions by governments, beneficiary communities, and funding agencies.
Guided by the principle espoused in the widely-used oration “what happens there… happens here,” the world’s governments made concerted efforts to deal with radicalization through country-specific as well as regionalized deradicalization initiatives. The UN consolidated these initiatives and designated the newly-created UNOCT as the multinational body to support and coordinate global efforts. Specialized projects implemented by the UNOCT have the ability to decrease the incentives towards recruitment and radicalization by terror groups. Through programs that incorporate and facilitate the coordination of communities in counter and deradicalization efforts, member states can pacify violent groups, resolve underlying grievances, and achieve political objectives that support peaceful coexistence.
Photo by Mhrezaa.
Francis M. Kabosha is an independent researcher and former Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Officer in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations of the United Nations.
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