Journal for Deradicalization
Not a member yet
320 research outputs found
Sort by
Working Paper: Designing Narrative-Based CVE Products With A Structured Professional Judgment Approach
Get PDFInspired by methods used in risk assessment, this paper suggests a structured professional judgment approach (SPJ) to facilitate the decision-making process in expert group settings tasked with the development of narrative-based countering violent extremism (CVE) products. The added value of this concept is to systematically apply the relevant knowledge distributed among the literature and identify the strengths and weaknesses of the narrative-based CVE product in early stages like the baseline assessment. This may enable campaigners to avoid expensive mistakes and accelerate the development of products. A tentative checklist is provided. Furthermore, indicators for monitoring and evaluation are suggested
What About the Camp Followers – and their Children?
Get PDFUN Security Council Resolution 2396 (2017) on Foreign Terrorist Fighters (Returnees and Relocators) urges nations to improve information and evidence sharing while developing tailored prosecution, rehabilitation and reintegration strategies; including programs addressing radicalization in children associated with “Foreign Terrorist Fighters.” The need for such programs has gained urgency since the collapse of Islamic State (IS)/Daesh, with the detainment of IS family members in overcrowded camps in Syria, and their uncertain fate following the Turkish military Operation PEACE SPRING, in October 2019. Approximately 2 million children underwent Daesh indoctrination June 2014 – 2019, and this process continues to be led by women in many detention camps. The heightened sense of vulnerability to terrorist attacks in Western nations has led many nations to refuse the return of children to their home country, or initial entry - fearing that their past radicalization will lead to future terrorism. Such decisions contravene, among other instruments, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Convention on Refugees (1951), Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (1961), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC 1989), and the Optional Protocol to the CRC on Children in Armed Conflict (OPAC, 2000). This paper examines emotional traumas experienced by Daesh “camp followers,” particularly the children, and the psychological rehabilitation and social reintegration challenges they face as they grow to adulthood. This paper argues that the psychosocial support needed for rehabilitation and reintegration is better found in Western societies than in refugee camps, which are often incubators for future terrorists
An Assessment of Returning Foreign Terrorist Fighters’ Commitment to Reintegrate: A Case Study of Kwale County, Kenya
Get PDFThis study seeks to contribute to filling the prevailing research deficit in empirical data informed by Foreign Terrorist Fighters (FTFs) and their experiences of, and challenges in, reintegration, through qualitative interviews with returning FTFs in Kwale County, Kenya; a county producing a relative majority of Kenyan recruits to Al Shabaab, who are offered amnesty upon return to their county of origin. The Life Psychology framework, which assumes an inherent human strive to obtain a good life, i.e. life embeddedness, is adopted for the analysis. The study finds that returnees commit to reintegration in the absence of other alternatives, due to economic incentives and longing for acceptance. It confirms that the process requires the societal motivation in facilitation, but will fail without the sustained commitment of the returning FTF. The study further establishes that returning FTFs are not able to obtain a flow in life embeddedness, which would indicate inability to reintegrate. Yet, many of the interviewed returning FTFs express the contrary, which challenges the concept of life embeddedness as an indicator for reintegration. The study further challenges the general assumption that deradicalization is a precondition for reintegration, as it finds that radicalized individuals are able to reintegrate into communities of origin without deserting held radical beliefs, if those communities share radical sentiments
Reviewing Radicalization Research Using a Network Approach
Get PDFIn an effort to discern determinants of political radicalization, scholars have discussed and investigated a considerable number of personal or contextual constructs. Yet the existing literature reviews on this topic have mainly focused on specific data sources and research approaches (e.g., survey research), whereas an integrative overview is still missing. This study provides a systematic review of 57 published studies while particularly focusing on differences in the prevalence of considered determinants across research approaches (i.e., survey approaches, experimental approaches, and digital trace data approaches). As an innovative approach to systematic review, we apply a network approach for analyzing the most prevalent constructs and related hypotheses in the literature. Network analysis is particularly useful in this context because, it allows the visualization of the structure of constructs and hypotheses proposed in the field as well as the identification of crucial concepts. The review reveals differences across empirical approaches and closes with a discussion of over- and underresearched constructs, their generalizability across research approaches, and potentials for future research. We conclude by recommending a stronger integration of constructs and perspectives as well as a more rigid consideration of causal inference. Editorial Note: This article underwent a post-publication review and revision in response to criticism about problematic use of a closely related and previously published article. The corrected version was uploaded August 4, 2020. Authors' Correction Note:Reviewing Radicalization Research Using a Network ApproachVeronika Batzdorfer & Holger Steinmetz In the corrected article, the authors respond to criticism regarding similarities in the literature search process and insufficient connections between a recent meta-analysis (Wolfowicz, Litmanovitz, Weisburd, & Hasisi, 2019) and the present paper. Although the present paper cited Wolfowicz et al. (2019) several times, these linkages were not presented well enough. In the corrected paper, these connections are emphasized in the following way:1) In the introduction, we note that the review builds on the meta-analysis by Wolfowicz et al. (2019) and stress the add-on value of our paper and the possibilities of fruitfully integrating both studies2) In the method section, we note the similarities of both reviews in the search process, data bases, and search terms3) In the discussion section, we added a discussion in which we integrate results of bothDue to the correction, readers are now better informed about similarities and differences of our studies.Wolfowicz, M., Litmanovitz, Y., Weisburd, D., & Hasisi, B. (2019). A field-wide systematic review and meta-analysis of putative risk and protective factors for radicalization outcomes. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 1-41
Identity Reconfiguration and the Core Needs Framework: Exit Narratives among Former Far-Right Extremists
Get PDFThis empirical study examines intensive interview data collected from eight (N=8) former members of white supremacist organizations in order to understand the meanings of exit – that is, disengagement and deradicalization – from the extremist’s perspective. Using a thematic analysis approach, our findings build on the distinction in the existing exit literature between push and pull factors and the process of role exit identified by Ebaugh (1988). These push and pull factors as well as social identity, we argue, are subsumed within a complex exit process, which includes disengagement, identity deconstruction, and transgressive and transitional relationships. For some, this process culminated in an accomplished identity reconstruction and deradicalization. Most importantly, our findings suggest that exit is linked to entry by a developmental drive that we call the participant’s core need. The core need was the background motivator of entry, disengagement, exit, and ultimately deradicalization. We think that this identity reconfiguration and core needs framework may help make heterogenous exit trajectories that have remained puzzling for researchers more understandable
A Second Chance? Dutch Muslim Women on the Reintegration of Female Returnees from Islamic State
Get PDFThis paper presents the results of a mixed-methods survey of the perspectives of 208 Dutch Muslim women on the reintegration of female returnees from the Islamic State (IS). Based on the responses and written statements made by Dutch Muslim women of Moroccan, Surinamese and Turkish ethnicities, respondents perceived greater risks associated with different female returnees, especially if the community in which respondents lived were resistant to the idea. However, Muslim female returnees were seen in sympathetic terms when perceived as presenting fewer risks to national security. The study demonstrates how receptive different Dutch Muslim women are to the reintegration of female returnees from IS, where issues of identity and political culture also play a role. The findings suggest that successful reintegration also needs sustainable reintegration into an emotionally supportive social network on the one hand and that programs need community support and acceptance on the other. The gendered approach offers valuable insights on how Muslim women can play a crucial role in deradicalization
De-radicalisation Through the Performative Arts
Get PDFThe Arab-Israeli conflict plays out on a variety of arenas. With regards to international involvement and support, the discursive aspect of the conflict is particularly important; how each side represents itself and the other. In this paper, the discursive means by which contemporary theatre dealing on the Arab-Israeli conflict are examined, with specific regard to changing these frames in a way that can allow for more dialogue and the deconstruction of demonising tropes that continue to frame the conflict today. In the works of Naomi Wallace’s Vision One: a State of Innocence, a powerful message to this end is delivered, creating an uneasy link between a Palestinian lady and the Israeli soldier who shot her daughter, but died in her arms. Rife with accusations, the play yet manages to bind the two characters together through a trauma that each has lived, a continues suffering of the radical elements in their societies. This connection draws a sobering, yet hopeful conjecture about the ongoing nature of the conflict; the more each side has radicalised itself and inflicted harm on the other, the more the self has suffered, too. The resulting trauma experienced is common ground on which the two sides can understand each other. As a performed experience, the stage is shown to be a safe space on which to express this possibility of approaching the other, of taking down walls both sides have built up for over half a century, and allow for the possibility of recognising each others’ humanity
Talk is silver and silence is gold? Assessing the impact of public disengagement from the extreme right on deradicalization
Get PDFThis article explores the relationship between disengagement and deradicalization processes among 15 individuals who have left the neo-Nazi movement. The participants in this study were initially interviewed in 2015, and the interview process is still ongoing. In this particular study, the differences between individuals who disengaged publicly, that is, those who did not or could not conceal their engagement with the movement, and individuals who were able to and/or wanted to keep their past a secret, are studied. The analysis of the interviews has focused on the outcomes of revealed or concealed stigmatization, in particular in relation to how disengagement was or was not followed by deradicalization. The findings suggest that those who disengaged publicly followed a clear path from disengagement to deradicalization, whereas those who tried to conceal their former involvement in the neo-Nazi movement showed a more complex pattern. Among the latter are individuals who are not yet deradicalized. However, they want to live “ordinary” lives and to have a family, free from fear that neighbours or people at work will stigmatize them and dissociate themselves from them. It is also clear that these participants were to a greater extent less satisfied with life in general. The findings also stress the ethical problems involved in using former neo-Nazis as public examples, as this traps them into a former neo-Nazi identity, thus creating new trauma
Fighting Back: The Atomwaffen Division, Countering Violent Extremism, and the Evolving Crackdown on Far-Right Terrorism in America
Get PDFThe early months of 2020 brought an intense and persistent crackdown on neo-Nazi terrorist groups in the United States, with both traditional arrests and new legislations increasing the pressure on a range of organizations, primarily the Atomwaffen Division and the Base. This article assesses the effectiveness of these measures, analyses remaining gaps, and concludes by arguing that the enduring focus on terrorist “organizations” will miss the lone actors that typically perpetrate attacks, and that effective and sustained counterterrorism success moving forward will therefore require longer-term, better-funded, whole-of-society deradicalization and countering violent extremism programming, which so far has been largely ignored in America’s countering far-right terrorism toolkit. The American far-right’s ideology exists largely due to conspiracy theories demonizing Jews, Muslims, African Americans, and liberals; deterring terrorism in our synagogues, mosques, churches, and supermarkets will require a new approach, founded on breaking down those conspiracy theories and ensuring that vulnerable individuals are no longer drawn in by hateful and pernicious ideologies
Moving Toward the Enemy: A Case for Missiological Engagement in Counter/Deradicalization
Get PDFThe church on mission, especially in the Middle East, has been a controversial topic with memories of the Crusades and colonialism burned deep in the psyche of the region. While much attention has been paid to the implications of Islamic Theology in conversations about extremism and radicalization in the Middle East, Christian Theology and Missiology, have been largely neglected. The great migratory people movements of the last few years, especially in the Middle East, have brought the church into more intimate contact with historic enemies and the results are arguably unprecedented. Unexpected stories of worldview change among former extremists and exponential church growth in the Levant are widespread. This paper illustrates the phenomenon with stories from Lebanon which provide an interesting laboratory for research into how the church has contributed to the deradicalization of Syrian Muslim refugees. Common ground between the fields of missiology and de/counter radicalization is explored and time is taken to orient those who may be new to missiology to the concepts of doing justice, loving neighbor and loving enemy as integral practices of the Christian faith. Finally, this paper attempts to demonstrate that the church may have a role to play in de/counter radicalization if it is given space to carry out its natural mission and intervene pragmatically in social ills that are often drivers of radicalization, ideological re-pluralization and the creation of spaces for societal belonging. The paper closes with some practical suggestions for both fields and suggest that in our increasingly pluriform and globalized society we cannot afford continued isolation and kinetic measures as the primary tactics for countering and preventing extremism