Preventing Violent Extremism: Leaders Telling a Different Story

"It is widely acknowledged that violent extremist groups develop through processes of engagement, communication and conversation. Thus, the relevance of bringing together all relevant stakeholders, without which change and real impact will never be achieved."

In an attempt to bridge the gap between civil society and governments in understanding how to best prevent violent extremism (PVE), enhance citizens' voices, and foster government's accountability, Club de Madrid (CdM), with the support of the Commission's Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development (DG DEVCO), organised a one-day roundtable on September 28 2016 to launch their new joint initiative, "Preventing Violent Extremism: Leaders Telling a Different Story". With a focus on Tunisia, Lebanon, and Nigeria, the 12-month project aims at strengthening counter-narrative messaging and producing a multi-dimensional response to extremist messaging by channeling the collective expertise of policymakers, media representatives, experts, and practitioners and the wisdom and experience of the CdM Members, all of them democratically elected, former Presidents and Prime Ministers. Structured activities include regional forums, qualitative research and content analysis, CdM Member-led missions and bilateral meetings, and online campaigns and recommendations. The kick-off meeting in Brussels, Belgium brought together experts in the field of preventing/countering violent extremism (P/CVE) and counter narratives, European Union (EU) representatives, government officials, youth and women's groups representatives, and media practitioners, among others. This report highlights the essence of discussions during the kick-off event, including opportunities, challenges, and future steps.

Discussions during the meeting built on the CdM's Global Consensus on preventing and Countering Violent extremism and recommendations formulated during the Madrid+10 Initiative. They underlined the need to promote a new, alternative approach focused on democracy, human rights, and rule of law when preventing violent extremism.

Divisions, exclusion, inequality and discrimination are recurrent drivers of violent extremism, according to the report. Participants in the first session of the kick-off event analysed different approaches to delivering alternative narratives against violent extremism, focusing on inclusiveness and shared societies, community resilience, and the need for youth and women's empowerment. Exchanges pointed to several key areas to be included in a comprehensive P/CVE framework, amongst them: inclusive and shared societies, legitimacy and good governance, long-term prevention, engaging with and empowering young people, technology, and education and skill development.

The participants felt that it is crucial to understand the ideological construction of the narratives of violent extremists in order to develop a more effective counter and alternative discourse to challenge these messages. Here are some ideas discussed regarding a different and positive story:

• People are driven by a message that is linked to local and personal concerns. Participants encouraged counter-narrative designers to adopt a human interest approach, focusing on community grievances and developing narratives with powerful emotional contents (emotional communication).
• Messages that compose narratives should be culturally relevant and identity-based. A platform (linked to their own culture) will allow these communities to adopt, own, and complement a particular response.
• Narratives should aim to strengthen the respect and protection of civil rights.
• There is a need to offer non-violent, inspiring alternative messages to those who may be persuaded to support or join violent extremist groups: messages of unity in place those of division, love in place of hatred, and defiance in place of fear.
• Narratives should highlight everyone's humanity, diversity, and inclusion - especially that of historically marginalised groups.
• The ownership and acceptance of the narratives on the ground must be ensured. It is crucial to go to their spaces and speak their language, delivering targeted but simple words. As important as the content are the style, melody, and tone of the narratives.
• In many cases, developing the messages is not the determinant factor; rather, it is the way the messages are presented.
• Explicit links between religious faith and violent extremism must be avoided. This type of counter-messaging may deepen feelings of islamophobia, and islamophobia feeds radicalisation.
• Exclusionary and discriminatory speeches from policymakers trigger hate speech, intolerance, and violent extremism.
• An effective alternative narrative has to be local. Youth, community leaders, local Imams, and trusted media are the best options to deliver them.

Those at the meeting explored the fact that, in addition to the message, targeted communication strategies should take into account a series of elements: the messenger, the recipient, and the methods of communication. A series of charts in the report examines these interrelated factors. A pilot study in Lebanon (June 2016) found that heads of neighbourhood have personal qualities that can generate trust within communities and make them effective first responders. These qualities can be summarised as follows: a credible, non-corrupt person who does not use his or her position to "swindle" or make a profit; a person who promotes moderate stances and uses moderate speech; local to the area, not just the region or the city, and speaking common people's language; and not politically aligned or promoting a partisan agenda.

With regard to the role of the media, participants discussed the following, in sum:

• Media and communication strategies need to be a priority in promoting and disseminating positive voices and alternative narratives.
• Media and social media have never been the main channels for radicalisation. This process mostly happens offline: face-to-face, day-to-day, one-on-one. Nevertheless, media is important as a validating factor, especially among youth groups.
• People can be radicalised online through personalised, targeted communication and personal messages. The success of extremist groups, however, does not lie in the dissemination of these online messages but on direct interaction and local and sub-local channels.
• The potential of media lies in its capacity to identify grievances as well as local personal feelings of injustice and frame them as a global struggle, an ideology, or a narrative.
• Independent media has a prominent role to play in opening free spaces for dialogue, thus minimising the likelihood of turning these debates into darker spaces.
• Debates on the role of media are often shaped on the basis of assumptions rather than evidence, leading to useless if not harmful actions. This stresses the need to build a stronger evidence-based strategy to improve media strategies and inform decision-making.
• The media can help improve accountability, transparency, and dialogue and can serve as a platform for advancing a wide range of governance and social inclusion issues, which are profoundly linked to the root causes of radicalisation and violent extremism.
• Social networks are the vehicles of choice in spreading extremist propaganda. Further discussion is needed on the role of tech and media companies in addressing these threats and the type of public-private partnerships that need to be strengthened in order to combat the former.

The report stresses the importance of building from scientific evidence - for example with regard to understanding the intended audience of counter-narrative initiatives. "Despite the growing interest in developing effective counter narrative strategies, most of the programmes implemented lack an analytical evidence-based framework. An effective approach must bring together the various positive narrative efforts as well as provide an understanding of the dynamics of how an individual receives and perceives the messages." As stated here, the first element of analysis to understand the political and social strategy of ISIS is getting to know what topics the terrorists are using to seduce their audiences. An analysis of 1,308 videos shows that the group always refers to 4 main themes. For example, there was the projection of explicit violence, with at least 50% of executions inspired by scenes of the most popular action movies/video games among young audiences in Western countries.

The goal going forward is to establish and promote frameworks for collaboration and multi-stakeholder dialogue through which both policymakers and the civil society can be more effective in telling and promoting a different story. There is a gap that goes beyond simply engaging the communities - the issue is how these communities should be engaged. "Current efforts are insufficient. Civil society and grassroots organizations lack the capacity and resources to do it by themselves. Governments, on the contrary, have the potential but often lack the commitment and impetus to put the appropriate mechanisms in place for civil society engagement and participation." The following recommendations will feed future debates and upcoming project activities:

• Enhanced collaboration between government and researchers will require platforms and spaces for dialogue and knowledge exchange thorough which researchers and civil society organisations (CSOs) engaged with work on alternative/counter-narratives can effectively share and communicate their findings to national, regional, and international actors, including practitioners and policymakers.
• The role of the political leaders in opening doors and bridging the gap between civil society and policymakers needs to be mainstreamed.
• The CVE community's communication strategy must be better coordinated, as must the type of messaging international development actors, governments, media actors, and tech companies are delivering.
• Government and international actors should increase their support to local community actors (front liners), including youth and women, for capacity building - technology, production, communications, and campaigning - to detect early sings of radicalisation and violent extremism.
• Evidence building, monitoring, and networks needed to develop better-informed and evidence-based policy decisions on effective narratives must be broadly supported.

The approaches, challenges, and recommendations discussed in this meeting will be incorporated in the in-country and regional implementation of the Preventing Violent Extremism: Leaders Telling a Different Story project.