In 2015, the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), with the generous support of European Commission Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations (DG NEAR), launched the Pilot Project on Countering Radicalization and Violent Extremism in the Sahel-Maghreb – an ambitious project that sought to work with civil society organizations in nine countries of the region in order to pilot and evaluate small-scale interventions of varying nature, scope and duration. The ultimate goal of this Pilot Project was to better understand what works and what does not work in terms of strengthening the resilience of local communities to radicalization and violent extremism.
After five years of implementation, with more than 80 interventions, more than 500 activities and more than 23,000 individuals involved, UNICRI and DG NEAR are proud to present the results of this research. Not only does this represent an effort to organize and share a large amount of primary data collected, but it is also a way to share the main lessons learned and provide evidence-based recommendations to the international community to help inform more effective future interventions.
This report is part of the concluding phase of the project, and represents an effort to organise and share a great amount of primary data received primarily from grass-root organisations through reporting, field surveys and visits. Its intended primary audience are practitioners in the field, who will be able to fully appreciate the complexity of the issue they are dealing with. The report offers a possibility to make comparisons between grievances across the countries and the two regions. It lists frequently encountered problems in implementing this type of sensitive projects at the level of communities, shares strategies employed to overcome them and offers an honest evaluation of possible success and not so successful stories.
However, the report represents an important source of information also for policy-makers as it demonstrates the consequences of some policies which, while made with best of intentions, have unexpected and occasionally even adverse effect. The report argues that the complexity of the phenomenon of violent extremism calls for nuanced local knowledge and for engaging local stakeholders in policy-formulation, ensuring thus their commitment to implementation.
You can find the original publication here
