Policy brief summarizing lessons learnt on the EU’s measures to prevent violent extremism in the region

How do EU initiatives that are geared to help prevent and counter violent extremism in North
Africa and the Sahel match the underlying drivers of radicalisation? This PREVEX Policy Brief
offers a reading of EU strategies in the backlight of our findings, which stem from fieldwork
that was conducted in cases of both occurrence and non-occurrence of violent extremist
escalation across North Africa and the Sahel. As scholarly literature lays emphasis on how
phenomena such as violent extremism are highly context-dependent, it is crucial to understand
regional and local dynamics of social change and intermediation. This brief therefore provides
an overall assessment of EU P/CVE policies and projects in North Africa and the Sahel,
focusing on key contextual policy issues: democratic governance, rule of law, education,
gender, reintegration. It argues that EU’s emphasis on rule of law is particularly appropriate,
while there is room for greater engagement in the fields of education and reintegration –
provided that conflict-sensitive lenses are carefully applied. In the fields of democratic
governance and gender, instead, a mismatch between general strategies and on-the-ground
implementation can be observed. Targeted research in these critical areas of intervention and
assistance is highly needed. Overall, our analysis invites to consider radicalisation processes
not as social pathology but as ongoing social phenomena that take place in a space where several
actors rival for material and ideational resources, and therefore require careful assessment and
multi-scalar prioritisation, including at the regional and transnational level.