Comparison of experiences and best practice in CVE drawn from research in other Countries: Countering Violent Extremism in Europe
At the time of writing, a majority of European countries had national CVE programmes and action plans. While not all of these strategies can easily be compared or ranked, they offer a vast pool of relevant approaches. The paper will present case studies from Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria, respectively dealing with national action plans, schools, coordination, referral mechanisms, and prisons. My argument is that these countries’ experiences offer valuable lessons which may help to address the problems with Britain’s Prevent strategy, especially the lack of trust and participation by British Muslims. They demonstrate, first and foremost, that there is not just one way of doing things, and that other countries have found new and innovative ways for dealing with issues that, in the British context, often seem intractable. They also show that over-securitisation, as well as the absence of transparency and consistency, and the resulting lack of trust from British communities in CVE approaches, are not inevitable, but have resulted from mistakes, which other countries have managed to avoid. The “toxicity” of Prevent may make it necessary to re-brand the entire strategy, but it is equally important to fix the problems that have resulted in Prevent becoming “toxic” in the first place. Learning from the experiences of other countries is one of the easiest ways for doing so.