By Lauren Van Metre and Thomas Leo Scherer  

  The United States Institute of Peace seeks to advance the field of peacebuilding by evaluating the evidence base supporting its core practices, such as dialogue and conflict analysis, engagement with religious leaders, and the prevention and countering of violent extremism. These systematic reviews identify effective programming and new approaches for further exploration. This evidence review paper evaluates the evidence and practice of an evolving approach to preventing and countering violent extremism: understanding and strengthening community resilience. Preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) is unique among peacebuilding areas. The field was initially shaped and influenced by a frenzied national security response to a perceived imminent threat from a global religious radical movement that sought the destruction of the West and its secular governments. Thus, the problem of violent extremism and its countering strategy were neatly encapsulated in an ideological paradigm that facilitated crisis decision-making rather than purposeful action in support of an evidence-based policy and practice. Today, in promoting a community resilience approach to P/CVE, it is critical to steer away from earlier ideologically influenced forms of community engagement by acknowledging that ideological remnants persist and continue to do harm to frontline communities; these forms of community engagement scapegoat communities for attracting violent-extremist networks and target them as “threats” for security force responses. Instead, the P/CVE field needs to adopt a radically dif­ferent resilience approach that presumes and strengthens a community’s capacity to resist violent extremism.

Washington, DC:  The United States Institute of Peace , 2023. 72p.