How do you make communities more resilient to radicalisation into violent extremism? Are community-level actions sufficient to counter violent extremism and its effects? What approach should be taken to designing effective assistance?
Over the past five years, UNICRI has overseen projects building community-resilience across nine countries of the Sahel-Maghreb regions. From street theatre to workshops on democracy, religious issues and civic engagement to carpentry classes to charters on equitable natural resource sharing, grass-root partners from Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, Chad, Niger, and Burkina Faso worked with local communities, mapped their grievances, and implemented measures making them more inclusive, socially cohesive, and resilient. In parallel, UNICRI collected data, canvassed patterns, and formulated insights. The findings are now available in the report “Many hands on an elephant”.
The report argues that there is not one answer to any of the above questions. While underlying grievances, in general terms, are of the same type for all observed countries, the approaches to addressing them need to be highly contextualised, informed by local (power) dynamics, histories, cultures and traditions.
Join UNICRI and the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations (DG NEAR) for the presentation of the report, the main findings of the initiative and discuss with four partner CSOs their experiences of and suggestions for working on preventing violent extremism at grass-root level in highly challenging environments.
If you would like to participate, please register at: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqdOCtpz4uHdNl7FAclKAO5iVPHYkLDH99
