As the country wrestles with cases of terror attacks and recruitment to violent extremist networks, the need for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (PCVE) measures is ever-increasing.
The reviewed National Strategy to Counter Violent Extremism (NSCVE) is forthcoming, tasked with increasing resilience to reject violent extremism and remaining relevant against emerging trends of violent extremism.
I want to voice out a few concerns from a peacebuilding lens on the reviewed NSCVE. To start with, we need to acknowledge the National Strategy to Counter Violent Extremism (NSCVE), which came into being in 2016. The NSCVE, flaunted by the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC), opened a platform for engaging civil society actors and the local communities to strengthen the whole-of-society approach to preventing and countering violent extremism.
The NSCVE facilitated the bridging between the government structures and the civil society organizations promoting the softer approaches in PCVE, leveraging the expertise and resources of various stakeholders, including law enforcement agencies, religious leaders, and community-based organizations, among others. Incipiently, the nine-pillar approach in the NSCVE was commendable to kick off the PCVE agenda to maintain security in tactically important localities and ‘winning hearts and minds’ of local communities in countering terrorism.
Further, the devolved nature of the NSCVE to the counties, as County Action Plans (CAPs), was acclaimed locally and internationally as a successful all-inclusive template for PCVE localization for countries grappling with terrorism in the Global South.
Therefore, the new revisions to the NSCVE were deemed essential based on the lessons learned from the previous NSCVE and the impetus to keep pace with new trends in violent extremism. Against this backdrop, the anticipation for a reviewed NSCVE is ongoing, with different stakeholders giving their views.
A prerequisite for an effective PCVE strategy is to comprehend the complexity of violent extremism. This entails how we define and frame the term violent extremism in the strategy, which enables us to understand the processes involved and the outcomes of violent extremism.
Source: The Star by Dr. Fathima Azmiya