- Lotta Rahlf, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt: Evaluating efforts to counter violent extremism: How and why evaluation systems differ across Europe
- Rohan Stevenson, University of Helsinki: Problematising extreme right-wing violence in counterterrorism policy: what’s the problem represented to be?
- Camilla Winde Gissel, C-REX, University of Oslo: P/CVE in the Nordic countries and the case of Finland
Abstracts
Evaluating efforts to counter violent extremism: How and why evaluation systems differ across Europe
Lotta Rahlf, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF)
Lotta Rahlf’s doctoral project systematically compares how P/CVE evaluations are structurally organised across Europe. By mapping various ‘P/CVE evaluation systems’ and examining factors that may explain their differences, her dissertation draws attention to the variety of ways countries organise the generation of evaluative knowledge to respond to increasing demands for evidence-based P/CVE measures. Filling crucial theoretical and empirical gaps in P/CVE research, Rahlf particularly examines the levers that make P/CVE evaluation systems more monocentric in some countries and more polycentric in others. This means that her dissertation explores why P/CVE evaluations are strongly controlled by the government in some contexts while such activities are more distributed among several entities, including civil society, in others. Rahlf employs a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fs/QCA) to investigate whether any combination of five proposed conditions influences the degree of polycentricity of a P/CVE evaluation system. Subsequently, she will select three countries for subsequent in-depth case studies of their respective evaluation systems focusing on what evaluative knowledge they produce. As one of these case studies will most likely be a Nordic country, it will be of great value to present this dissertation and its interim results at the 2024 Nordic Conference on Violent Extremism.
Problematising extreme right-wing violence in counterterrorism policy: what’s the problem represented to be?
Rohan Stevenson, University of Helsinki
Approaches to the study of extreme right-wing (ERW) violence have so far been caught between the problem-solving - which aims to elucidate, catalogue, evaluate and, eventually, resolve the threat – and the critical – in which the extreme right is focused on as a corrective to perceived inconsistencies in terrorism research and counterterrorism practice. Despite apparent differences however, both approaches often adopt an essentialist view of ERW violence as an extra-discursive phenomenon that exists independently of the public, political and academic domains in which it is labelled as such. Following recent calls in the field of critical terrorism studies to ‘problematise’ ERW violence, this paper examines the ways in which the extreme right threat is analysed, classified, represented and contested in the formation of the counterterrorism policies of several European countries. It does this by combining two methodological approaches: Carol Bacchi’s ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ approach to policy analysis, which draws largely on the work of Foucault, and in-depth qualitative interviews with counterterrorism practitioners. In doing so, it aims to both continue and broaden earlier attempts at a discourse-centred and constructivist terrorism studies.
P/CVE in the Nordic countries and the case of Finland
Camilla Winde Gissel, C-REX, University of Oslo
Globally, Prevention and Counter Violent Extremism (P/CVE) programs and projects lack external evaluation, and it has often been left up to the individual programs to evaluate their methods and success. This is likewise the case of the Nordic countries. This paper discusses some of the challenges and successes of NGO-based P/CVE intervention programs in presenting some main findings from fieldwork and interviews with clients and practitioners NGO-based programs in Helsinki.
The paper will discuss the issues of defining what ‘success’ looks like in P/CVE programs. Furthermore the paper highlights the funding challenges of NGO-based P/CVE work and how funding challenges affects the P/CVE intervention work.