It is an accepted adage of military strategy that one should know your enemy as well as they know themselves. Such insight, the sages tell us, offers the best opportunity for meeting the challenge posited by the enemy in the most effective way.
Modern violent extremism falls into two distinct categories and having a clear understanding of what kind of extremist one is dealing with is a key factor in determining the most appropriate response in dealing with them.
Firstly, there are those extremists for whom violence is a default position. In a non-political or ideological context, such people would be violent criminals or gangsters. For the politically or ideologically inspired, violence is the point of departure in a quest to achieve a political or ideological goal. This type of violent extremist leaves every other avenue for progress unexplored, they simply decide what their objective is and then set a strategy of violence for the achievement of those aims. This type of violent extremist can rarely be dissuaded from their chosen course of action. Indeed, any effort to dissuade such extremists simply validates their course of action, as they see countering and prevention efforts as a sign of weakness on the part of those propagating such approaches.
The second type of violent extremist is more transactional in nature. They have observed the fundamental and underlying disparities and failures in a given social system, and has explored (even if only peripherally) the various option open to them to change the system from within. Their inability to achieve their goals within the system leads them to adopt violence as a transactional mechanism for change. Very often in such extremists the violence is as much a signal/call for their grievances to be taken seriously as it is an actual strategy for change.
The key difference between the default violent extremist and the transactional violent extremist is that the latter is fundamentally disposed to dialogue, whereas the former rejects any form of engagement other than violence and indeed sees the violence as an end in itself. These two groups offer CVE practitioners with very different options and opportunities.
It is essential that the CVE community and the intelligence community work as closely as possible to accurately identify and differentiate between the default violent extremist and the transactional violent extremist. By leveraging the inherent capacity and skill of the intelligence community for assessing and building a psychological profile of actors of interest (in this case violent extremists), it should be possible to fairly accurately determine which of the identified categories the extremist falls into.
If the intelligence assessment is that the extremist sees violence as the default method of action, then directly engaging them to try and dissuade them from engaging in violence is an activity of steeply diminishing returns. A more effective use of resources and a more appropriate response to such persons is to arrest them if such action is appropriate, subject them to the due process of the law and to remove them from any situation where they can influence others to follow their course of violent extremist action.
In cases where the intelligence assessment identifies the extremist as a person who has turned to violence as a transactional means of bringing about change, the opportunities for effective CVE interventions are much richer. Such transactional violent extremists often retain the hope that their turn to violence will be seen as a plea for recognition and engagement and as such, they are fundamentally open to the idea of dialogue as a means of resolving their grievances. Intelligence and psychological assessment can often also reveal triggers and openings that will allow CVE practitioners to direct their programmes more effectively at individuals and communities. This more effective and targeted use of resources will ultimately also prove popular with governments and donors alike.
A further benefit of an intelligence led approach and the segmentation of violent extremists in the default and transactional categories, is that it offers authorities a basis for isolating the default violent extremists and limiting their capacity to radicalize others to their way of thinking. It also serves to drive a psychological wedge between the ranks of violent extremists in general, and demonstrating that dialogue and engagement is a viable means of affecting change in the society and the default violence is a road to isolation, imprisonment and in extremis, death.
Having a robust and skilled intelligence assessment process as early as possible in any CVE programme makes operational sense and it is a sound financial strategy too. CVE practitioners are sometimes reluctant to engage with the intelligence community too closely, often seeing it as the shadowy arm of the State, however, it is the one institution that has the skills and experience to study, evaluate and assess violent extremists and to provide the kind of in depth information and insight that allows CVE practitioners to know their enemy as well as they know themselves, and then to act accordingly in the best interests of the society.
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