Search results

Purpose – To examine how John Stuart Mill’s harm principle can guide debates surrounding definitions of radicalization, extremism, and deradicalization.

Methodology/Approach – This chapter begins by surveying definitional debates in terrorism studies according to three identified binaries: (1) cognitive versus behavioral radicalization; (2) violent extremism versus non-violent extremism; and (3) deradicalization versus disengagement. The author then interprets Mill’s harm principle and assesses which interpretation researchers and policy-makers should favor.

Findings – Applying the harm principle suggests that researchers and policy-makers should prefer behavioral over cognitive radicalization, violent over non-violent extremism, and disengagement over deradicalization. This is because government intervention in people’s lives can be justified to prevent direct risks of harm, but not to change beliefs that diverge from mainstream society.

Originality/Value – This chapter extends previous work that applied the harm principle to coercive preventive measures in counter-terrorism. It makes an original contribution by applying the principle to definitional debates surrounding radicalization and counter-radicalization. The harm principle provides researchers and policy-makers with a compass to navigate these debates. It offers an analytical method for resolving conceptual confusion.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the case of the Aspiration, Communication and Transformation campaign conducted by journalism students to counter extremism as a form of experiential learning in Lebanese higher educational context. It documents the views and experiences of students in a service learning (SL) project for redressing a timely social issue.

This study employed a descriptive case study methodology involving a portraiture naturalistic approach for data gathering. It conducted semi-structured interviews with three participating students to learn from their experiences in countering extremism. This was complemented by two interviews with the instructor in charge of the project and an external stakeholder.

Results emphasized the combination of applying the broadcast technical skills of the course to countering extremism in a volatile political context.

The findings are only a mild reflection of countering extremism through SL since it focused on a single case study involving a limited number of participants. However, the study offered common sense conclusions having broader applicability.

This topic is of particular importance to higher educational institutions and communities working on countering extremism through education, particularly in contexts rife with violence and ideological indoctrination.

This paper has social implications on promoting awareness about extremism as a challenging social debacle. It presents workable recommendations for fostering a stronger relationship between higher education institutions and communities to defy extremism. It shows the importance of connecting curricula to community needs.

This paper fills a gap in the literature pertaining to the role of higher education institutions in countering extremism through SL in Lebanon and the MENA region.

Purpose – UK laws surrounding the duty to prevent individuals being drawn into terrorism often focus on the need to safeguard the populace from exploitation by terrorist or extremist groups. It is within this context that countering violent extremism (CVE) work often takes place. This chapter explores how this legal duty shapes CVE projects in the UK, drawing on practitioner’s perspectives.

Methods – Writing from the perspective of practitioners from ConnectFutures, an organization that has been operating since 2013 in the UK and internationally, who advocate for a contextual safeguarding approach to provide a more holistic attitude to the prevention of violent extremism and exploitation.

Findings – Exploring the intersections between multiple forms of criminal exploitation, as well as engaging in the spaces and places young people experience harm, allows practitioners working in the CVE space to contribute to the protection of individuals from terrorist and extremist radicalization.

Originality/Value – Applying the new developed contextual safeguarding framework to CVE projects provides a contemporary and alternative ways to conduct CVE work. The chapter provides overviews of three CVE projects running with young people today in the UK, exploring how the new frameworks are adopted within these programs, all designed to address the complex causes of violent extremism.

Purpose – The chapter explores the UK’s evolving counter-radicalization program – Prevent – and its increasing alignment with a broader Counter Extremism agenda, which it argues exemplifies not merely a concern with countering radicalization or terrorism, but a broader “civic turn” toward a narrow and restrictive conception of integration and citizenship.

Methodology/Approach – The chapter draws on a range of studies of Prevent and the governance of British Muslims, to examine the traces and impact of Prevent and Counter Extremism agendas across a range of governance domains, including urban governance, schooling, and public sector institutions and integration.

Findings – Prevent has undergone substantial conceptual and operational expansion that has meant that its purpose and efficacy as a counter terrorism strategy has become ambivalent. Its evolution into an element of a broader integration policy places limits on the terms of particularly Muslims’ citizenship. It also brings it into tension with other public sector duties and legal norms.

Originality/Value – The chapter extends existing studies of the permeation of security concerns across governance and public life, and the securitization of citizenship, to examine how these have been expressed in particular domains of governance and their implications for the inclusion and accommodation of Muslims. It also offers a caveat to the tendency in much of the literature to see such securitization as exemplifying a highly cohesive governing project.

This chapter draws upon empirical data collected with former violent extremists in the UK to address the phenomenological attractions of engaging in terrorism. We argue that there needs to be more consideration of the attractions of belonging to a terrorist organization and a more thorough appreciation of the experiences that attract people to acts of terrorism. This chapter begins to address these issues by engaging with Jack Katz's (1988) research on the phenomenological foreground, the compelling and seductive qualities of engaging in criminal acts. Katz's highly original and influential research shifts attention away from traditional criminological approaches that emphasize structural background factors such as class, unemployment, gender, poverty, or education. As Katz argues, this structural level of analysis overlooks the subjective phenomenological feelings that accompany criminal behavior. We argue that this is a serious omission as it is precisely the search for thrill, risk, and intense excitement that can serve to motivate further acts of criminality.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the process of risk assessment for terrorists and violent political extremists and to present an example of such an approach. The approach proposed is referred to as the VERA 2 or violent extremism risk assessment protocol (Consultative Version 2).

A review of the knowledge base relating to risk assessment and risk assessment methodology was undertaken with a focus on relevance to individual terrorists and violent extremists. The need for a specific approach for the risk assessment of terrorists that differs from approaches used for ordinary violent criminals was identified. A model that could be used for the risk assessment of terrorists was identified with pertinent risk indicators. This was structured into a protocol referred to as the VERA (Consultative Version 2). The approach is intended to be applied to different types of violent extremists, terrorists and unlawful violent offenders motivated by religious, political or social ideologies.

First, risk assessments of adjudicated terrorists and violent extremists should be undertaken with risk indicators that are relevant to ideological motivated violence. Indicators used for ordinary common violence differ in substantive ways from those relevant to terrorists and therefore may have questionable relevance for the assessment of risk in terrorists. Second, it is possible to construct an evidence‐based risk assessment approach for the range of violent extremists and terrorists using a structured professional judgment approach with pertinent risk indicators. The VERA 2 is an example of this type of risk assessment protocol for terrorists and unlawful violent extremists.

Risk assessment tools that have been developed for ordinary violent criminals and members of organised criminal gangs should be used with caution with terrorists, violent extremists and other perpetrators of ideologically motivated unlawful violence. Specific risk assessment approaches for terrorists with relevant indicators should be used. At this time, terrorist oriented approaches such as the VERA 2 are to be considered consultative and used as an add‐on to other established approaches.

There are few transparent, structured risk assessment approaches that use indicators specifically relevant to violent political extremists and terrorists. One new approach, the VERA 2 is outlined in the paper using risk indicators that differ in substantive ways from those used for other ordinary violent criminals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore two distinct yet complimentary “structured professional judgement (SPJ)” approaches to terrorist/extremist risk assessment on the vexing issue of how best to deal with the subjectivity inherently involved in professional judgement.

An SPJ methodology is considered the best practice approach for assessing terrorism risk. Currently there are four specific terrorism risk instruments that have been published in the literature. Two of these SPJ tools are examined in detail, namely the Violent Extremist Risk Assessment tool (Pressman, 2009; Pressman et al., 2012) and the Structured Assessment of Violent Extremism (SAVE) tool (Dean, 2014). The paper critically unpacks the conceptual and methodological stumbling blocks of an SPJ methodology for controlling human subjectivity.

The paper presents the case for adopting a “controlling in” approach rather than a “controlling out” approach of an analyst’s subjective tacit (in-the-head) knowledge inherent in their professional judgement. To have a quantifiable SPJ tool that triangulates the multi-dimensionality of terrorism risk which can validate an analyst’s professional judgement is the next logical step in terrorist/extremist risk assessment work. The paper includes a case example of this “controlling in” approach and the validation methodology used by the SAVE software system.

The implications for practice range from incorporating the SAVE system in operational policing/national security work with its quantitative nature, triangulated risk scores, visualisation output of a prioritised case report with in-built alerts, to the required training for system calibration to enhance user proficiency.

This is a highly original and innovative paper as this type of quantified SPJ tool (SAVE) has up until now never been applied before in terrorist/extremist risk assessment work.

Purpose – This chapter provides a roadmap for future research and evaluation on violent extremist risk analysis.

Methodology/Approach – The authors synthesize the lessons learned from process evaluations of general violence risk assessment, bias research, survey designs, linguistic analyses, and spatial analyses, and apply them to the problem of violent extremist risk assessment and management.

Findings – The next generation of violent extremist risk assessment research will necessitate a focus upon process, barriers to effective implementation and taking the human element of decision-making into account. Furthermore, the development of putative risk factors for violent extremist attitudes and behaviors necessitates a movement toward more survey-based research designs. Future risk assessment processes may additionally take language and spatial components into account for a more holistic understanding.

Originality/Value – Based on existing literature, there is a paucity of research conducting process evaluations, survey designs, linguistic analyses, and spatial analyses in this area. The authors provide several roadmaps, assessments of respective strengths and weaknesses, and highlight some initial promising results.