This article outlines the policy recommendations for addressing radicalisation in Northeast Syria. The findings will reflect on how ongoing implementation from local partners, adopting and refining their use of the Early Warning & Early Response System can help create concrete and meaningful policy direction to tackle issues stemming from radicalisation.
INTRODUCTION
Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA), in collaboration with local partners in Northeast Syria (NES) developed an Early Warning & Early Response System (EWERS) that has been specifically designed to work as an alarm bell to warn local partner NGOs about the rise of violent extremist radicalisation in the hyper-local settings where they work. The development of this policy brief has resulted from a review of the EWERS operability, interviews with implementing partners, NPA staff, and EWERS developers as well as an in-depth review of the situation reviews in NES. Further review of local partners’ proposed programme activities to tackle the EWERS identified signs of radicalisation has occurred.
Areas of most concern regarding radicalisation in NES is the increasing return and reintegration into local areas of persons who were family of Islamic State (IS) members. This is a wide remit relating to post-conflict social cohesion that requires a narrowing down to two policy areas:
1. The attitude of the community towards family members of former IS members.
2. The status and vulnerability of women and children in the post-IS period, particularly for those retaining stateless legal status.
Recommendations for these two policy strands will cover how the local partners can continue to use and adapt the EWERS and the approaches in which they should be supported. The policy recommendations will be drawn and synthesised from the best practices of exit work of formers and cohesion in post-conflict settings.
BEST PRACTICE &ANALYSIS
Upon reviewing evidence derived from scholarly work, INGO reports and local partner reports, the NES’s current context is fragile, and several drivers exist that could lead to recidivism of returned IS members, or radicalisation of new community members. Best practices of deradicalisation programmes are when they account for the norms and values of the reintegrating community and work within those boundaries, in other words, we can secure community resilience to radicalisation through social movement and cohesion. This acknowledgement comes with the understanding local partner NGOs cannot provide all the needed policy and programme changes by themselves to create comprehensive social cohesion, particularly in Syria where there is an absence of a formalised national peace and governance plan, prison rehabilitation, economic development of NES and the competing security mandates.
However, we present areas in which local partners can contribute towards greater social movements in tackling radicalisation and the positive is that a grassroots approach from NES NGOs will be agile and crucially, take better account of the context. The pillars on which the local partners build a policy response in the next phase are the following:
- • Tackling radicalisation among recent returnees is a short and medium-term objective. Radicalisation literature shows that if recidivism can be avoided for approximately a year, the chances of formers returning to violence are significantly lowered. Having appropriate radicalisation programmes in place that work with returned formers and monitor their progress is crucial.
- • The overall priority should be building cohesive communities. Recidivism is not the most important factor in ensuring resilient communities, indicators that underline cooperation and closer bonds between returnees and reintegrating community are much more significant.
- • The security of families, including women and children of IS families should be a priority when they return. Families of IS are likely to be stigmatised when they return and are at risk of experiencing violence and should be protected as best as possible while cohesion programmes are ongoing.
POLICY IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Policy recommendations that follow are along two tracks, the first is a concrete recommendation for NPA and interested donor communities to further embed and develop the use of the EWERS system in NES. This is a crucial step as it allows the system to be further streamlined through further and longitudinal data collection leading to further refinement of the system. NES is an ideal context in which to continue developing the PeaceAlert system into a 2.0 version which will make it transferable to other contexts. To do this the following is recommended:
- • Extend the EWERS to new partners across NES to create the ‘PeaceAlert Development Programme’.
The EWERS requires a longer trial period to fully understand its impact predictive impact on violence tension, and how organisations use that data. This requires further information to be uploaded to the system by partners who work on different programmes as the PeaceAlert system will increase its efficiency with more data. Once more organisations can be included NPA should form a development group that use the PeaceAlert to monitor and evaluate the use of the system in real time. Through this development group, the impact of the EWERS can be made, along with offering how the system will be further improved and transferred to other contexts.
The second track of information collected leads to the creation of an easy to use approach template for policy formation that partners can employ to create programmes and frame their general approach to community engagement.
Recommendation One: Use the EWERS
The EWERS should form the backbone of policy development for local partners in NES going forward. It remains a key tool for understanding, in an agile manner, the current tensions on the ground as well as identifying areas where cohesion can take hold. Here is how EWERS can be used:
• The EWERS survey questions should be adapted to reflect the historical tensions in certain areas of NES. Vectors and drivers of radicalisation are hyper-local and programming from NGOs must reflect that. The survey will particularly benefit from including several questions related to the attitude and perception of returnee families of IS. An attitudinal survey of the members of the reintegrating community would be crucial in identifying the values and possible barriers to inclusion that the community is likely to experience.
• The survey must have diverse participants. Including different ages, genders and social groups is crucial to ensuring the community members feel their views are valid and providing a wider look at the issues ongoing.
• Use the attitudinal data from the EWERS survey to understand the community’s values. The EWERS survey should understand to what extent the community is open to reintegrating former IS members and their families. The survey will identify ‘red lines’ that the community will have to seek to create policy and programming that is sensitive to their needs.
• Use the data produced by EWERS to brainstorm solutions with the community. The surveys provide a snapshot, but they do not develop policy action points. Initial data collected through surveys should then be presented to the community for discussion and possible action points. This phase should seek to identify contextual factors which shape their desire and capacity to facilitate or resist re-integration and what agency they have to assist the programmes.
Recommendation Two: Creating the Policies
Policies should be integrative as much as possible and as such should contain two important pillars if they are to achieve the most realistic chances of success:
• A means of directly improving the ability of formers to contribute towards society. Deradicalisation programmes at a minimum must seek to remove the former IS members from active engagement from the violent group and contribute to the community. Longer-term ideological change is a secondary goal.
• Encourage as wide community engagement as possible. Narrowing the division between returned families and formers of IS and the reintegrating community is fundamental. Ensuring that programmes and activities include different members of the community is crucial to their success and reducing stigmatisation of families and formers.
Recommendation Three: Advocating for Policy
Policies are going to need societal buy-in from as many different sectors and institutions as possible and thus will require advocacy approaches. To accomplish this NGOs should think about the following:
• Include as many stakeholders as possible. Tackling radicalisation and increasing social cohesion is a societal goal and as such requires as many different stakeholders as possible to be included.
• Sell the success of programmes as more than deradcialisation. The wide range of stakeholders are likely to be motivated by different types of success and under broad concept of deradicalisation can lead to positive developments in the local economy (from formers participating in labour market). Ensuring the policy is sold appropriately to each stakeholder is crucial.
• Success of programme should have longer-term outlook. Social cohesion in post conflict settings is a long-term goal, considering the displacement, underdevelopment in communities and trauma suffered by the population. As a result, singular programmes are not going to address the problems that exist in the community and should be part of over puzzle. As a result, the part of puzzle this policy is addressing should be explained along with the preferred follow-up programmes.
Further Recommendations: Integrating Vulnerable People
The clear challenge facing NES is the attitude towards returned children and women from IS families. Addressing this is a long-term goal and requires near constant communication with the community to ensure buy in. The EWERS can help understand the thoughts and feelings of the community towards the returned, but policy making above must be inclusive to their concerns to ensure tension is reduced as much as possible. Without this communication and understanding of the needs of the community, vulnerable family will be pushed to the margins of society and remain a risk to potentially be radicalised.
ENDNOTES
[1] Clubb, Gordon, and Marina Tapley. “Conceptualising de-radicalisation and former combatant re-integration in Nigeria.” Third World Quarterly 39.11 (2018): 2053-2068, p.2062
[2] Reed, Pohl, Tackling the surge of returning foreign fighters. 2017, from website: https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2017/07/14/tackling-the-surge-of-returning-foreign-fighters/index.html
[3] Brechenmacher, Stabilizing northeast Nigeria after Boko haram (Vol. 3). Washington, DC: Carnegie endowment for international peace, 2019
