Edited by Diego Muro

Building resilience to violent extremism has become a matter of great concern for European cities that have experienced attacks or that fear experiencing them in the future. Mayors, municipal leaders and other local authority representatives are leading efforts to empower city governments across the EU and develop pragmatic and non-ideological policies. As increasing numbers of citizens rank violent extremism as one of their top worries, urban centres have effectively become the front line of the fight against radicalisation. It is in European cities where transnational extremist threats take shape in the forms of hate speech, recruitment networks, radical cells and terrorist attacks, and it is also in European cities where evidence-based plans to counter and prevent violent extremism at local level need urgently to be devised. Cities are obvious settings in which to implement the motto “think globally and act locally”.

Barcelona: Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, 2017. 118p.