Finding the right mix: re-evaluating the road to gender-equality in countering violent extremism programming

ABSTRACT

The adoption of gender mainstreaming strategies has become an increasingly common expectation within countering terrorism and violent extremism policy and programming. Through comparative case study examination of two iterations of a Strengthening Resilience to Violent Extremism programme, this article shows that practitioners are often left struggling to design effective and transformative strategies that can overcome practical and conceptual barriers. This is due to several intersecting and compounding elements, including institutional conceptual limitations around gender and gender equality in the security context, a weak evidence base on how and why gender plays a role in violent extremism, and a lack of effective feminist knowledge transfer and co-creation processes between academic and practitioner researchers.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• gender mainstreaming
• gender equality
• countering violent extremism
• security policy

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the STRIVE II programme team members who contributed their time and insight to making the writing of this article possible, especially the team leader Martine Zeuthen. Also, the author would like to acknowledge the time and effort of the editorial team and peer reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I acknowledge that more than just male and female identities exist, and further that gender identities and performances beyond the binary have an impact on VE because of the way that extremists characterise and utilise gender. However, this article follows dominant gendering mainstreaming practice, in which male and female are the primary distinctions.

2. CVE programming in the transnational arena is mostly implemented by Western governments (e.g., the EU, US, Australia, etc.) loosely following the same sets of guidelines from international bodies. RUSI is a leader in the development of guidelines for CVE programming in the transnational space, alongside other organisations such as the UN, GCTF, Hedayah, etc. This assessment of guidelines is based on RUSI’s Prevention Project https://rusi.org/project/prevent (gathering the evidence base for P/CVE programming) among other work.

3. One interview was conducted one-on-one with a single interviewee and the other interview was conducted with three members of the team in a group setting. Martine Zeuthen handed over the role of team leader three years into the programme, so there was a different team leader at the late stages of the programme.

4. This assessment is based on the large scale reviews of P/CVE programming completed by RUSI, including the Prevention Project https://rusi.org/project/prevent and the systematic literature review https://english.iob-evaluatie.nl/publications/sub-studies/2021/02/01/literature-studies-%E2%80%93-counterterrorism-and-preventing-and-countering-violent-extremism.

5. EU, Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe, A Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy; See: https://eeas.europa.eu/topics/eu-global-strategy_en, https://europa.eu/capacity4dev/results-and-indicators/countering-violent-extremism, and https://europa.eu/capacity4dev/results-and-indicators/99831/results-indicators.

6. It should be noted that the final six months of this programme were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent restrictions on travel and in-person gathering. The programme team adjusted programming as much as possible to continue carrying out what activities were possible with the online and telephonic resources available (RUSI 2020).

7. Please see the 2018 special issue in The African Journal at https://journals.udsm.ac.tz/index.php/ar/issue/view/286/showToc. It includes the following articles: Analytical Framing of Violent Extremism and Gender in Kenya: A Review of the Literature (Sahgal and Zeuthen 2018); Women and Recruitment in the Al-Shabaab Network: Stories of Women being recruited by Women Recruiters in the Coastal Region of Kenya (Badurdeen 2018); Coastal Muslim Women in the Coast of Kenya: Narrating Radicalisation, Gender, Violence and Extremism (Mwakimako 2018); Understanding the role of Gender Relations in Radicalising and Recruiting Young Muslim Women in Higher Learning Institutions in Kenya (Ali 2018); Impact of Violent Extremism and Recruitment of Spouses on Widows in the Coastal Region of Kenya (Shauri 2018).

8. Many of these lessons have been carried through to RUSI’s implementation of STRIVE Afghanistan (2019-), including a Gender Advisor being appointed for this programme.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica White

Dr Jessica White is a Research Fellow in the Terrorism and Conflict group at the Royal United Services Institute in London. Her expertise encompasses countering terrorism and violent extremism policy and programming, as well as gender mainstreaming strategies. She has over a decade's worth of experience in research and as a security practitioner, with a previous career in the United States Navy.