Community empowerment > CVE

On September 18, the United States Institute of Peace hosted the RESOLVE Network 2019 Global Forum. This year, the topic of the forum was resetting priorities to address violent extremist threats. Several TED-style presentations and several panels were held throughout the day. Experts from around the world gathered to present their work and discuss the challenges extremist groups present.

The first of these panels was a discussion on non-state governance and “going local.” The discussants were Houda Abadi, the founder and Executive Director of Transformative Peace, Linda Bishai, a professorial lecturer at the GWU Elliot School of International Affairs, and Katherine Zimmerman, a research fellow at American Enterprise Institute. The panel was moderated by David Yang, the Vice President of the Applied Conflict Transformation Center at USIP.

Yang asked what going local meant for the panelists. Abadi responded by criticizing current counter extremist efforts as too focused on security operations over community building. She argued that ISIS still is in MENA, hyper localized and addressing grievances where a village’s government and Western powers could not. US countering violent extremism (CVE) strategy needs to shift from establishing counter narratives that attempt to combat radical jihadist views to creating counter offers to forge relationships with community members.

Zimmerman continued by discussing how communities have become fragile and violent extremist groups have filled a gap in governance. ISIS and other violent extremist organizations (VEOs) exchange predictable rule of law and a level of stability to a community for the ability to operate in their village.

Bishai suggested that the structural conditions that explain why locals turn to VEOs have been largely ignored and need to be thoroughly analyzed to create a strategy to counter them. Personnel working in these areas have a high rate of turnover and are unable to build trust with local community leaders. Abadi agreed and said the focus needs to be on empowering communities and not countering ideology. Metrics such as the number of extremists eradicated are not relevant. Understanding the mechanisms that turn people to these groups is need to establish long-term stability and counter VEOs.

Zimmerman said that going local is pivotal for CVE. Local nuances have been overlooked by Western practitioners in MENA and other regions. Western practitioners must understand the local context as well or better than VEOs to effectively counter the proliferation of radical ideology. Bishai suggested that vocabulary ought to be changed to community empowerment rather than CVE or other aggressive terminology. Locals feel as if they are considered an enemy to Westerners and not a partner in combating extremism. Abadi confirmed that sentiment and stated that in her field work, local people feel as if they are “lab rats” in an experiment for foreign entities to figure out what strategies work to counter extremists. The counter terrorism paradigm needs to end and move towards building communities from a hyper localized starting point.