jihadism – Research and Projects

This Thursday, the Euro-Arab Foundation gave the seminar Prevention of Radicalisation in the EU and Member States: policies, strategies and areas of action from multi-level and multi-agency approaches, as part of the University Course on violent radicalisation and jihadist extremism organised by the University Centre of the Civil Guard, attached to the Carlos III University of Madrid, and aimed at the Civil Guard, the judiciary and local authorities.

Javier Ruipérez, Director of Research and Projects at the Euro-Arab Foundation, and Daniel Pérez, researcher at the same, were in charge of this training, whose objectives were to contextualise the launch and consolidation of European prevention policies; to review the evolution of the psychosocial models that explain radicalisation and to address the multi-agency and multi-level prevention approach.

Spanish National counter-terrorism strategy

In this seminar, the Spanish National Strategy against Terrorism (ENCOT-2023), which was approved this week by the National Security Council, served as an example within the state plans that reflect the strategic recommendations of the European Commission.

The researchers from the Euro-Arab Foundation, both belonging to the Area of Prevention of Radicalisation and Violent Extremism, stressed that prevention policies, whether European, national or local, ‘must be based on scientific knowledge, for which it is essential to study both risk indicators and protection indicators, and that it should be a cross-cutting approach that can be used for jihadism as well as for multiple ideologies’.

On the one hand, the need to invest more in primary prevention, the first level of the pyramidal representation of society to which the majority of the non-radicalised population belongs, was stressed. The second level covers the population susceptible to radicalisation and the third level covers radical or terrorist individuals.

For the Euro-Arab experts, there is a risk of population transfer from the first level to the third, due to the current process of polarisation, and the measures to be taken in that case would be much more difficult to implement and much more costly. To avoid this, they said, “it is essential to focus on prevention policies in protection and on people’s resilience and autonomy”.

Finally, the importance of “bringing European policy down to the local level”, through national plans, and ensuring that there is feedback, i.e. “that the local level also inspires national plans and European policies to combat violent radicalisation and extremism”, was also highlighted.

The Euro-Arab Foundation, through its research group, has carried out various training activities on the prevention of radicalisation in European projects in which it participates, in Spanish universities or through the European Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN).

Prevention and coping with violent radicalisation. A guide for frontline practitioners. Published by the University of Cordoba and co-published by CIFAL and the Euro-Arab Foundation.

The final event of the European MIRAD project ended two years of work dedicated to assestment and prevention of radicalisation. The objectives of the MIRAD project were achieved thanks to the cooperation of the project consortium partners, to which the Euro-Arab Foundation belongs, from seven European countries, together with a group of experts from the MIRAD Advisory Board, the KES Advisory Council and members of the Expert Boards on Jihadist Extremism and Right-wing Extremism.

The event was opened by Christiane Hoehn, Principal Advisor to the EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator, who acknowledged the good work of the MIRAD project and its alignment with the strategic orientations of the European Commission. The final conference was attended by leading practitioners, prison staff, security forces, probation officers, NGOs and policy makers from different EU and non-EU countries.

During the event, the results of the project were presented, such as a tool to assess the reliability and capacity of NGOs to support de-radicalisation processes. Among the most expected results, the adaptation of the IRS risk assessment tool to consider the role of gender and ideology in the radicalisation process with a focus on right-wing extremism and jihadist extremism stands out.

Besides, a series of collaborative protocols for multi-agency transition were presented, stemming from the key role played by CSOs/NGOs and volunteers in promoting reintegration programmes, fostering inter-agency cooperation. The results of mixed-method training courses (training of trainers, e-Learning course, virtual reality training scenarios) to maximise the results of radicalisation disengagement and reintegration programmes were also made public.

Some of the conclusions reached at the final MIRAD event were the still high threat of islamist terrorism and the growing danger of right-wing extremism. The need for rehabilitation outside and inside prison and the need to assess what happens after prison was also addressed, as well as the identification of prisoners vulnerable to radicalisation as a basis for prevention and disengagement, and the promotion of models and protocols for inter-sectoral and inter-institutional collaboration.