Supporting Young Peacebuilders to Counter Extremism

Development gains are easily undermined by rising extremism in fragile contexts. In response, donors are keen to embed elements of CVE, or ‘combatting violent extremism’, in their cooperation programmes. Engaging young people in the projects is crucial, as it is they who are most at risk of recruitment by extremist groups, and they who can build a peaceful future for their countries.

The kind of support the EU and other donors can give young people on CVE was raised at the European Development Days in Brussels, and was the focus of a panel on ‘Promoting young people as peacebuilders’. Several organisations with long experience of engaging youth in difficult contexts shared their projects with Capacity4dev.

‘Better Together’ in Lebanon

Better Together is an EU-funded programme which aims to create social cohesion between Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian youth. It has engaged with around 320 young people in North Beqaa and South Lebanon.

“Extremist groups thrive on division,” said Elisa Dari, Director for Lebanon at Search for Common Ground, which implemented the project. “Bridging the ‘us versus them’ realm is at the base of conflict transformation, and the way we see doing CVE around the world.”

Better Together begins with an intensive six-day summer camp in which the participants, aged 15-25, live, cook and clean together. Initial bonds formed, they begin a storytelling journey with Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese artists. “They produce a play, write a song, shoot a documentary, design a comic book, and all of this portrays their stories,” said Dari. In the process, they often find out that they have more in common than they thought.

“They realise that although they may look different or sound different, they very much have a lot in common as youth – they have the same frustrations, the same challenges, and when they come together they can achieve much more than when they are divided,” said Dari. “Any project that engages youth and provides a voice, a space they can influence their situation in their societies, inherently helps prevent radicalization of communities, or at least gives an alternative to the attractiveness of extremist groups.”

In the following video, Dari outlines the goals of Better Together and the lessons learned (0:05), what the project meant for participants (1:51) and how its impact can be sustained (3:09):

‘The Feast’ in Lebanon

Sectarian rifts continue to divide the country, which went through a protracted civil war between Christians and Muslims before the Syrian refugee crisis added to tensions. Bridging the divides between 18 religious groups (four Muslim, 12 Christian, one Druze and one Jewish) is key to moving forward peacefully.

‘The Feast’ is an interfaith project run by World Vision Lebanon, the Institute for Middle East Studies and Lebanon Youth for Christ. It brings together young people from four faiths - Muslim Shiite, Muslim Sunni, Christian Maronite and Evangelical and runs team-building projects to lay the foundations of religious tolerance.

A young representative shared her story of the difference The Feast has made for her, helping her to move forward after losing a family member to Daesh, rather than ‘face violence with violence’:

Open Street Map in Tunisia

“In Tunisia one of the things that drives people to join extremist groups is lack of political participation, marginalization, and lack of trust between young people and the state, whereby they don’t see a future for themselves in Tunisia,” said Crozier.

Google maps has some blind spots, and one of them was in the suburb of Ettadhamen in Tunisia’s capital Tunis. “When you zoomed in, there was no detail there,” said Crozier. This turned out to be a way in for International Alert to engage young men and boys from marginalized neighbourhoods, a demographic often hard for peacebuilding organisations to reach, and to forge a positive relationship between them and the local authority.

Through Open Street Map, the young men were able to add alleyways, cafes and mosques to the map, creating a picture of their neighbourhood. They were then able to pinpoint problems in the community such as lack of street lighting, and bring it to the local authority. “That’s been really useful, because no other map exists for the local authorities – the latest map is dated 1999 and is on paper,” said Crozier. More importantly, “it creates coordination between young people and the state, and demonstrates to local authorities that young people can be a positive force for change, when they’re often seen as the problem.”

Crozier sees this initiative as a first step in developing young people’s capacity to engage at higher and higher levels of the state. “In the future, we hope to enable them to have a platform to discuss with the central government on key issues, and demonstrate that involving young people is a positive thing for peace, stability, economic development. If young people are engaged from the word go, it will help to prevent social unrest and issues like people joining extremist groups.”

Youth Councils, Vans for Peace and Prisons in Morocco

“We’ve learned that emotional experiences – either rejection, discrimination, helplessness from one side, but also acceptance, celebration, empowerment from the other side – are the most powerful thing that can change people,” said Noufal Abboud, Director for Morocco at Search for Common Ground.

SFCG runs several projects in Morocco to counter violent extremism from different angles, engaging youth, women and prison guards to “create that set of feelings, emotional experiences that can change young people but also let them change others.”

In the following video Abboud outlines SFCG’s work on CVE (0:07), projects in prisons (0:55), engagement with women (2:22), Young Leaders (3:06) and lessons learned (3:51):

A shared ‘lesson learned’ from all these projects was that they cannot work in isolation, and they need to be long-term and sustainable. Otherwise there is a risk that they can in fact increase instability by raising young people’s expectations of engagement and then disappointing them when projects run out of funding and when there is no civic space in which to participate.

Elisa Dari emphasized the importance of working simultaneously with local government and civic institutions to open up spaces for youth to engage. “Otherwise what you are doing is really raising expectations on one side, while you’re not really creating the opportunity for those expectations to be met on the other – and frustrated opportunities and frustrated expectations can actually turn in the opposite direction to that we want to go.”

Group

Conflict Transformation, Peacebuilding and Security Network

Further Reading

• International Alert report: Vulnerability and Resilience to Recruitment by Violent Extremist Groups in Syria
• WVI Feast
• Better Together project: Illustrated Book with art produced by the participants in the project; music recorded by youth participants; short movies by the youth participants: here, here and here; playlist with youth interviews
• Message from Neven Mimica, European Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development, on development and security

Teaser image credit: DEVCO image library, copyright UNWRA; European Union