Featuring:
• Keynote Address by Faiza Patel, Co-Director, Liberty and National Security Program, Brennen Center for
Justice
• Panelists include Peter Mandaville (Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason Univeristy);
Meredith Stricker (The Soufan Group), Haroon K. Ullah (Head of Strategy, Broadcasting Board of
Governors); Abdul-Rehman Malik (Council for Middle East Studies, Yale University) and others
Given ongoing political developments in the Middle East (the military defeat of IS; the proxy wars between Iran and Saudi Arabia; the ongoing military campaign in Yemen) and the power plays between key regional players like Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar, the way Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) is viewed and done has changed. As state support for CVE programs further cement the impression that they are merely a political tool, questions about the efficacy and impact of these interventions are brought into sharp relief. Furthermore, the lack of clarity in US policy on CVE has opened up a space to explore whether the mantle of “countering violent extremism” will be picked up by other governments, multilateral organizations, and civil society and if so what will CVE look like when it is led and guided by other governments players or by non-state actors with little state support. Furthermore, there is a need to consider whether the naysayers were right all along: that the best route to counter violent extremism is by actually addressing the underlying political and geopolitical issues which nurture and create the “fertile” ground for violence.
This colloquium brings together significant academic, policy and civil society voices to see beyond the current policy landscape and identify enduring challenges, new areas of policy and explore new formulations of CVE. It will uniquely look at the intersections between global and domestic debates about CVE; and investigate if there is a post CVE approach to violent extremism.
Panels will cover the following topics:
• The Failure of Fatwa: CVE and the Contested Legitimacy of Religious Leadership
• By Another Name: Emerging Civil Society Approaches to Confronting Violent Extremism
• No Government Required? The Impact of Non-State Actors in the new Digital Battlegrounds
• The Elephants in the Room: doing CVE by addressing root – political and geopolitical – causes
• “Post-CVE”: toward a new paradigm for policy & practice