While CVE often involves women as local partners, and leaders have readily cited women’s suffering to justify international responses, women are seldom understood as more than mothers or victims, let alone offered a voice in peace negotiations or the development of international stabilisation strategies. Strategy and peace deals continue to be developed almost exclusively by men behind closed doors.

Similar points can be made about the efforts to co-opt youth organisations for CVE rather than support their work in its own right.

What happens when you align aid with a war strategy?

Meanwhile, although CVE may at least offer resources to sustain women and young people’s rights, peace and development initiatives, rebranding these initiatives as CVE has the potential to undermine their effectiveness. If the implicit message of a jobs programme shifts from ‘we are supporting your livelihood because your well-being matters’ to ‘we are supporting your livelihood to stop you becoming a terrorist’, this carries risks: help for ex-combatants rather than the wider population can be necessary, but it can also prompt parents to enlist their children with violent groups (as was found during disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration efforts in Liberia among other places). Such programmes also look more like part of a war effort than altruistic assistance.

If the implicit message of a jobs programme shifts from ‘we are supporting your livelihood because your well-being matters’ to ‘we are supporting your livelihood to stop you becoming a terrorist’, this carries risks.

An extreme example of the dangers of merging aid with counter-terrorism came in 2012 when international staff working for Save the Children were ordered to leave Pakistan based on the disputed allegation that a doctor used the aid agency as cover for a CIA counter-terror operation to track down Osama Bin Laden. Using aid programmes to counter terrorists and support a war effort can not only alienate the local population, but also make aid agencies a target for attack. This is in part why Afghanistan has consistently been the most dangerous country for aid workers over the last 15 years (with other key war on terror battlegrounds such as Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Pakistan often prominent on the list).

Leveraging aid for CVE purposes could also mean continuing to throw resources and moral support at problematic local ‘allies’ of international counter-terror efforts – while failing to back agents of change across wider society to the extent needed. This pattern – as seen in the Vietnam war, as well as more recently in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan – usually serves to enrich and reinforce flawed allies, alienate and disempower local people and render assistance ineffective.

Seeking to change people’s minds without changing their lives?

Another concern with the CVE agenda – already touched on above – is its concern to tackle the ‘evil’ ideologies of angry and desperate people without sufficient attention to changing their lived reality. A central concern of CVE is to ask how governments and international actors can identify and ban the dangerous narratives that are pulling recruits into violent groups. Notably, the EU is stepping up the pressure on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Microsoft and others to remove ‘extremist’ content from web searches and social media.

Despite the concerns this raises around freedom of expression and the need for careful scrutiny over who defines the ‘extreme’ in future years, this seems reasonable, in that it is reserved for content that actively incites violence or hatred rather than suppressing ‘extreme’ views per se. However, of more immediate concern is the number of governments who, by pinning the blame for conflicts wholly on ‘extremist ideology’, are effectively burying any prospect of addressing relevant grievances – which would require some genuine introspection about their own roles, and consideration of foreign policy alternatives.

One example of this is the concept of ‘entryism’ – the danger of NGOs, academia and the media being infiltrated by ‘extremist’ elements – as advanced under the UK’s Counter-Extremism Strategy. Critics fear this will intimidate people who are targeted for having ‘extreme’ views from free expression and vigorous debate – including the kind of debate that could challenge poor counter-terror policies and improve the UK’s conflict policies. Indeed, while the UK establishment is occasionally willing to blame previous administrations or rival politicians for creating instability 5-10 years after the fact, it is unclear whether critical views and lessons are being factored into the UK’s strategies for dealing with today’s conflicts.

One of the problems underpinning the present spike in global conflict is the tendency for states to label their opponents as unlawful combatants whose views are too extreme to be thoughtfully examined. Examples include the narrative of the Syrian Government regarding its opponents, or Saudi Arabia in relation to Yemen’s Houthis. According to a UN Special Rapporteur, one risk here is how ‘legislation relating to extremism’ is being ‘used against the activities of non-violent groups[…] and against journalists and political activists critical of State policy.’ This is a disaster in the wider context of the great civil society choke out, in which more than 63 countries have recently passed restrictive laws to curtail, criminalise or discriminate against civil society.

CVE programmes tend to pander to this understanding. They go along with the redefinition of conflicts as problems caused by actors uncritically labelled as ‘violent extremists’. They then typically push for non-sensitive, depoliticised local factors to be addressed, while amplifying and supporting official government narratives. CVE thus focuses primarily on factors such as unemployment, lack of access to services and lack of fulfilling recreational activities for youth at local level.  They likewise focus on attacking the ideology of violent groups, with the result that they fail to explore dialogue and resolution of political grievances where there is a genuine problem and scope for addressing it.

In fact, transnational violent movements have proved adept at tapping into local grievances (as Al Shabaab has done in relation to the grievances of Muslims in Kenya). So it is certainly part of the solution for CVE-style efforts to address relevant local level factors rather than treating anyone fighting under the Al Qaeda or IS banner as part of an entirely homogeneous global fundamentalist movement. Depending on what is driving the conflict in question, addressing local level factors is often important and valid. It is just that comprehensive strategies require political injustices to be addressed at the same time.

The focus of CVE on local, apolitical issues tends to leave a gaping hole when it comes to the higher-level national and international injustices that can drive people to fight for violent movements. Governments may not want these issues on the table as part of their response to violent situations, but unfortunately today’s networked transnational insurrections are going to persist unless governments grasp the nettle of addressing their own considerable roles in driving and perpetuating conflict.

Consider Kyrgyzstan. On my visit two months back, communities told me about Kyrgyz and Tajik migrant workers who had joined IS in Syria. In many cases they were pushed to do so by the loss of gainful employment, income and status. In response, providing decent livelihoods could well change the calculus for such individuals. But they also joined to oppose the appalling suffering of fellow Muslims in Syria and Iraq. Saferworld has come across several cases in its local work of individuals who are connecting the suffering of Syrians to their own marginalisation as Muslim minorities where they live. In Tunisia last month, we were told of people becoming fighters in outrage about the suffering of Palestinians.

At present, CVE efforts in Kyrgyzstan involve some great initiatives on practical local matters – for instance, centres where police and communities come together to solve security problems. These are being accompanied by efforts to suppress ‘extremist’ narratives and counter-messaging. However, what such contexts seem to need is more space for dialogue. Given the repugnance of Islamic State, the idea of listening to disaffected young people who are tempted to support them, and pursuing reforms in cases where there are often legitimate concerns to address at local, national and international levels, has often seemed a bridge too far for CVE strategists. When some conflict actors and their supporters are designated as ‘extremists’, the task becomes effectively to change their wrong-thinking – which is seen as a kind of sickness.

However, Islamic State expert Scott Atran, among others, has dismissed most counter-messaging efforts as ‘unappealing and unsuccessful’. For example, in Tunisia last month, interviewees explained to us that the public had found an official counter-messaging campaign on Facebook both ridiculous and alienating.

Yet CVE efforts routinely exaggerate the power of religion and ideology, prioritise counter messaging, and fail to make changing people’s lived reality the fundamental focus of strategy in the way that rights, peace and development programmes typically do.

The preoccupation of the CVE community with finding an appealing counter-narrative is understandable in the wake of the adeptness of IS messaging, and the perplexing appeal that its gruesome communications strategy and recruitment networks have attained. Likewise, it is hard to disagree with the idea that apocalyptic-fundamentalist theology is in part a driver of some conflicts in its own right. Clearly ideology is playing a role: these are conflicts which cannot be fully understood by analysing the behaviour of violent groups as rational actors using political economy techniques. But we should not forget that research has questioned the link between religious ideology and participation in violent groups – and pointed at real grievances (marginalisation, oppression, lack of resources) as worthy of more attention than they are getting.

When people join violent movements, they face a high probability of dying for the cause. Some recruits clearly have a history of mental disturbance and a confused conception of theology and history, but the power of ‘extremist’ ideology also rests on palpable anger about real events – about atrocities and lives lived under the jackboot of repression and marginalisation with little right of reply. Transforming these conditions – and ideally turning people’s anger into momentum for positive change – is a necessary step for moving forward. Because of this, while it is right to challenge the promotion of violence in the immediate term, CVE needs to focus less on ideology and counter-narrative, and much more on ensuring meaningful dialogue on the political factors underlying contemporary conflicts.

This tallies with what we know about the drivers of conflict, and the conditions in which societies become more peaceful. When you analyse global data, it is clear that there are few conflicts in contexts where people can trust security forces, access justice and participate in decision making, and where their only prospects for a decent life are not stolen by corrupt elites. In 2015, just 0.5% of terror attacks occurred outside countries suffering conflict or political terror. Indeed, former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon articulated in his Action Plan on Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) that:

Yet CVE efforts routinely exaggerate the power of religion and ideology, prioritise counter messaging, and fail to make changing people’s lived reality the fundamental focus of strategy in the way that rights, peace and development programmes typically do.There are CVE programmes that work to improve state-society relations – empowering communities to press authorities for better policing, service provision and equality – but they are very much part of a wider context in which not enough transformation is being considered or attempted.  

_{Secretary General Ban Ki Moon had a clear vision of how to prevent violent extremism – but how clear-sighted will the UN be on the issue in practice? Credit: UN}

Could CVE narratives foment division and cement repression?

Finally, strategies focused on suppressing dangerous ideologies and messaging to counter ‘extremists’ could be dangerous. Apart from driving dissenting views underground, they could fuel hatred and suspicion in mainstream society towards those with dissenting views. There is a particular risk when ‘violent extremism’ is casually associated exclusively with particular religious, ethnic or tribal minorities. This has in many countries led to a culture of rising Islamophobia. Such careless narratives have the potential to create an enabling context for mob violence against minority groups, such as that seen in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, in 2010, or during Sri Lanka’s nationwide anti-Tamil pogroms in 1983, which were a key moment in the country’s downward slide into long and bloody civil war.

Careless campaigns can also bolster public demand for repressive and counter-productive counter-terror methods. Despite this, even the UN – an institution whose neutrality ought to remain a crucial resourcefor the resolution of international conflict – is currently signed up to campaign against ‘extremists’ hand in hand with a number of authoritarian African governments. At the very least, CVE awareness campaigns need to analyse, be aware of and monitor conflict sensitivity risks very carefully.