“That is simply one thing that goes with it”: former extremists in school settings and empirical evidence

ABSTRACT

The involvement of former extremists in preventing and countering violent extremism has attracted many advocates. Interventions in school settings by or with former extremists have been commonplace for a long time, and in some countries even for decades, which is reason enough to focus on the current research state. We did this through a synoptic examination of the empirical literature on the subject. Hence, we took an in-depth look at four experimental studies with robust samples. These studies investigated projects from Ireland, the Basque Country, Denmark, and Germany. The findings demonstrated two main points: (1) the empirical evidence showed a contrast to the anecdotal evidence, which mostly provided a positive assessment of former extremists in school settings, and (2) thus far, students’ perspectives on these initiatives have not been considered in a sufficiently differentiated way.

KEYWORDS:

• Former extremists
• school-based P/CVE
• students’ views
• education
• evidence

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This and all following direct quotes from German original sources were translated by the authors.

2 This source was anonymised to avoid advertising or discrediting the former extremist. The source publication date is given as reference.

3 In accordance with Horgan et al. (2016), violent extremism is seen “as ‘a willingness to use or support the use of violence to further particular beliefs, including those of political, social, or ideological nature. This may include acts of terrorism’” (p. 13).

4 “CVE is a realm of policy, programmes and interventions designed to reduce the terrorist threat through non-coercive approaches that directly address its root causes. CVE focuses mainly on countering the activities of existing violent extremists. Preventing violent extremism is broader than CVE, focusing on preventative approaches allowing for programming to take a broader approach to the underlying drivers that create vulnerabilities to VE.” (Holdaway & Simpson, 2018, p. 16).

5 According to Horgan (2009), radicalisation is “the social and psychological process of incrementally experienced commitment to extremist political or religious ideology” (p. 152).

6 Political extremism refers to a fundamental hostility to democracy, which can take on a specific ideological form and condense both on an attitude and a behaviour level. Islamist extremism is understood as a “religiously based form of political extremism” (Gansewig, 2018, p. 465).

7 “Primary prevention focuses on protecting people from developing a given problem. […] Secondary prevention focuses on halting progress of a given problem […]. Tertiary prevention encompasses the remediation of a problem among those who concretely manifest a given problem.” (Williams et al., 2016, p. 10).

8 For more information on the survey see Gansewig & Walsh, 2020a, p. 126.

9 E.g. https://journal-exit.de/die-botschaft/, October 3, 2021; https://www.lifeafterhate.org/speaker, October 3, 2021.

10 Original title: “Dando pasos hacia la Paz.”

11 Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI-2), Questionnaire to Assess the Concepts of Peace and Violence (PAVI).

12 “They were just bad people who wanted to fight,” “They were bigoted and wanted to hurt people from the other side” (Emerson et al., 2014, p. 45).

13 No project name was included in Parker & Lindekilde, 2020.

14 As Flensner at al. (2019) state, the impact assumption of entertainment education is based on Bandura’s social learning theory (p. 4). However, it is well known that social learning also teaches less socially desirable behaviour (Bandura, 1971). In this respect, this is no guarantee of positive effects of facilitating meetings between young people and former extremists, some of whom do not appear to be appropriate role models (see Gansewig & Walsh, 2021a, 2021/22).

15 This agency also conducted a satisfaction survey among participants. It is mentioned that this had yielded positive results (Parker & Lindekilde, 2020).

16 In accordance with Horgan (2009), disengagement refers to the behavioural level whereas deradicalisation describes changes regarding attitudes in an exiting process (p. 151).

17 Original title: “Schulunterricht Rechtsextremismus/Kriminalitätsprävention – Resistenz aufbauen gegen Rechtsextremismus.“

18 For additional information about the investigated seminar and the former, see for example Walsh & Gansewig, 2019/20, p. 4.

19 However, the evaluators considered impact assumptions often cited regarding formers in P/CVE. For further information see Gansewig & Walsh, 2020a, p. 113.

20 For information about the results of the participant observations and the teachers’ views, see Gansewig & Walsh, 2020a, p. 272.

21 The content analysis to evaluate possible fascination aspects referred especially to answers to the question “What did you like most about the intervention?” Furthermore, four different statements were added to the impact study questionnaire at timepoint t₂; those were particularly geared towards specific contents of the intervention (e.g. “I imagine life in the right-wing milieu to be cool” and “I imagine the life of a ‘gangster boss’ to be cool”). We found no significant differences between the IG and the CG in this respect (Walsh & Gansewig, 2019/20, p. 20). In contrast to this, three of the 28 teachers attending the interventions named possible aspects of enthusiasm and fascination: “Thus, some things may have awakened ‘desire’ in some students or may have offered ‘in some cases rather suggestions for imitation’.” As two teachers specified: “The presence of money, prestige and power was attractive for some students. Therefore, I lacked the depth in the ‘complicated’ stations of his life;” “Some students adore tattoos and fields of violence” (Gansewig & Walsh, 2020a, p. 301).

22 Multiple answers were possible.

23 Furthermore, the findings of the participant observations confirm this result (Gansewig & Walsh, 2020a, p. 272).

24 A recent survey in Germany identified 32 former extremists active in prevention in the period from 2001 to 2019, which is to be understood as a minimum number (Gansewig & Walsh, 2020a, p. 191). Although other studies on the topic are available from Germany (Knauthe et al., 2010; Lobermeier, 2014; Figlestahler et al., 2019), they are severely limited in their methodological robustness and explanatory power. In addition, they do not address the students’ perspective at all or do not do so in a differentiated way (Gansewig & Walsh, 2020b).

25 As Herrington (2015) pointed out, a non-conflict-sensitive approach can fuel tensions between groups and therefore feed the conflict instead of devitalising it (p. 31).

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.