On July 27, 2017, the Prevention Project convened some 40 representatives from multilateral and national development agencies, Ministries of Foreign Affairs, international NGOs and other relevant development actors for a roundtable discussion hosted at The Brookings Institution. The purpose was to share experiences and lessons learned on integrating preventing violent extremism (PVE)2 into broa...

Social media are used by an increasing number of political actors. A small subset of these is interested in pursuing extremist motives such as mobilization, recruiting or radicalization activities. In order to counteract these trends, online providers and state institutions reinforce their monitoring efforts, mostly relying on manual workflows. We propose a machine learning approach to support ...

This paper views Islamist radicals as self-interested political revolutionaries and builds on a general model of political extremism developed in a previous paper (Ferrero, 2002), where extremism is modelled as a production factor whose effect on expected revenue is initially positive and then turns negative, and whose level is optimally chosen by a revolutionary organization. The organization ...

This study examines the effect of exposure to communal violence on support for violent religious extremism. We argue that in communities with high levels of violence, individuals normalize aggressive behaviors and come to see non-conventional, black-or-white ideologies as more appealing. Using data from over 7,500 respondents in Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad, we employ multilevel structural equ...

What is community resilience in relation to violent extremism, and how can we build it? This article explores strategies to harness community assets that may contribute to preventing youth from embracing violent extremism, drawing from models of community resilience as defined in relation to disaster preparedness. Research suggests that social connection is at the heart of resilient communities...

This paper extends the club model of religion to better account for observed patterns of extremism. We adapt existing models to a multi-agent framework and analyze the distribution of agents and clubs. We find that extremism is more successful when religious groups are able to produce close substitutes for standard goods and that increased access to publicly provided goods can reduce the extrem...

This paper studies how a politician’s preferences and abilities to influence public and private sector productivity affect her choices over economic policies. Extremism between policies of leftand right-wing incumbents increases with ability, because voters are more willing to re-elect competent politicians. Positive correlations between certain ability dimensions and preferences amplify politi...

In various parts of the world, the continent of Africa is struggling with the phenomenon of terrorism and extremism more than other regions. This continent, for various reasons, including the various weaknesses of software and hardware, including economic backwardness, political instabilities, social inequalities, and foreign interventions that find their interests only in insecurity and instab...

Twitter is the largest and most popular micro-blogging website on Internet. Due to low publication barrier, anonymity and wide penetration, Twitter has become an easy target or platform for extremists to disseminate their ideologies and opinions by posting hate and extremism promoting tweets. Millions of tweets are posted on Twitter everyday and it is practically impossible for Twitter moderato...