Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism: Best Practices and Standardizations

Abstract

Preventing and/or countering violent extremism (P/CVE) involves the use of coercive or non-coercive means to dissuade individuals or groups from engaging in violent extremism and to mitigate recruitment, support, facilitation, or engagement of ideologically motivated terrorism by non-state actors. There is no defined set of practices, methods, or approaches used to evaluate the impact of P/CVE, but a rise in extremism, from the continued threat of Salafi-Jihadist terrorism to the rise of alt-right extremism, has forced practitioners in the field to understand who their target audience is before they begin the development of countermeasure programs. The following chapter sets out an approach for standardizing and regularizing a scope of best practices that should be used in the development of any P/CVE programs, using a simple checklist of five sequential steps that help to identify what P/CVE program is best used. This checklist will help identify the target audience, the use of prevention methods or countering methods, the type of engagement (direct or indirect), the type of program to be used, and the intricacies of the P/CVE program itself. These practices are supplemented by current examples of their use, and they will demonstrate how the wrong strategy applied to the wrong target can result in an ineffective program. This chapter provides a means for practitioners and academics to gain an introductory understanding of current best practices available for P/CVE across the spectrum of extremism and the ability for a simplified process to determine how to approach their own program’s target audience.