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“Most people are not radicalized” Global Perspectives on Resilience and Radicalization: Insights from the PREVEX Project

By Gilad Ben-Nun (Global and European Studies Institute) and Ulf Engel (Institute of African Studies)

The PREVEX project, spanning 18 countries across the Balkans, the Middle East, North Africa, and the Sahel, reveals why the vast majority of individuals do not succumb to violent extremism despite facing significant economic and social challenges. By adopting a global studies approach that accounts for local historical and cultural contexts, the research shifts the focus from ideological or religious motives to the material grievances—such as unemployment and limited educational opportunities—that often serve as the catalyst for extremism. The findings underscore the importance of community resilience, local governance, and economic stability in mitigating radicalization, while also critiquing the counterproductive nature of Western military interventions. These insights offer valuable, context-sensitive policy recommendations for effectively preventing violent extremism.

Image: Venora Cerimi/Unsplash

Why are some communities more likely to experience violent extremism than others?

This was the core question for a research project coordinated by the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), with 14 international partners – among them Leipzig University. Under the title “Preventing Violent Extremism in the Balkans and the MENA: Strengthening Resilience in Enabling Environments (PREVEX)” scholars based in the project regions and Europe have conducted fieldwork in the Western Balkans, the Middle East, North Africa, and the Sahel have studied thoroughly the issue of preventing violent extremism in these regions. The PREVEX project received generous funding through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (2020–2023).

The case studies included 18 countries: from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia to Algeria, Libya, Mali, Morocco, Niger, and Tunisia to Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the United Arab Emirates. The main findings have now been published in an open access book Resisting Radicalization. Exploring the Nonoccurrence of Violent Extremism – edited by Morten Bøås, Gilad Ben-Nun, Ulf Engel, and Kari Osland (Lynne Rienner: London, Boulder, CO).

Doing comparison

Given the heterogeneous spatiality and sociology of the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa, with their unique historical, social, and cultural characteristics, the methodology employed in this project had to be sensitive to the limits but also the opportunities for cross-cultural comparison. This ruled out straightforward political science, most-similar/ most-different systems designs, and other forms of conceptual Eurocentrism. Instead, we opted for a global studies approach that emphasizes the topic’s historicity and the researcher’s positionality. In our own research, the Leipzig group focussed on the comparative analysis of the various case studies and implications for policymaking. To deal with the inherent limits of cross-cultural comparison and a possible Eurocentric bias, we conducted our research in close collaboration with local stakeholders and mixed research teams in every country where we did fieldwork.

Key findings

Precarious living conditions across the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa can make these regions fertile ground for radical ideas. Nonetheless, despite genuine grievances and legitimate reasons for anger, most people who live in these areas do not succumb to radicalization, nor do they embrace ideas that lead to acts of violent extremism. With the goal of increasing the understanding of local community resilience in the face of violent extremism, this project has investigated not only the occurrence of violent extremism but also the non-occurrence of violent extremism in so-called enabling environments. We ponder why some communities are more or less likely to experience violent extremism than others.

While giving due regard to local and regional context sensitivity, the project was united around the findings that individuals’ journey into violent extremism that culminates in joining groups or insurgencies rarely starts because of religious convictions or political ideologies. Instead, genuine material grievances concerning unemployment, lack of educational opportunities, and lack of possibilities for social mobility mainly fuel extremism. This is not to say that religion does not factor in, but we think it matters differently from what is often assumed. Our findings suggest that insurgents use religion as an ideology and a branding technique at different times and for various reasons. However, if it is the case that people are primarily recruited on the basis of root causes, not religious convictions, it has important implications for how we ought to think about preventing and countering violent extremism programming in the future.

We have observed that most research on violent extremism focuses on answering the question of why people take up arms rather than the reverse question: Why do people living in enabling environments often choose not to become involved in political violence and why do they frequently seek to resist it, either openly or more subtly? This investigation of non-occurrence fills a gap in the scholarly literature on violent extremism. It also has important policy implications in that it can provide finely tuned, context-sensitive, and practical suggestions for preventing violent extremism by strengthening societal resilience.

Three comparative lessons

Seen through the wide optical prism of the case studies and the methodological approach explained earlier, several key lessons emerge. The first and perhaps most salient lesson concerns the issue of trust in governance, over, above, and beyond whether a particular society adheres to democracy in the more Western understandings implied by this term. In their approach to tackling extremism, Western actors have all too often resorted to a thematic focus centred on the conduct of elections, often without paying sufficient attention to structural parameters of social cohesion and societal resilience toward extremism as it manifests through more traditionally embedded long-standing local governance structures.

The second generic lesson from our work concerns economic conditions that intertwine with violent extremism. Across the board and almost without exception, notwithstanding the radically divergent social and regional environments within which our case studies were situated, dire economic conditions virtually always trumped ideological or doctrinal motivations to engage in violent extremism. From Kosovo to Mali and Niger, and from Tunisia to Iraq, economic drivers and especially youth unemployment were, more often than not, at the heart of people’s drive toward extremism. And vice versa: in countries such as Morocco, where a focus on strong economic development via major structural investment into broad infrastructure projects ensues, violent extremism could be mitigated.

The last general lesson is probably the most straightforward and has to do with Western military interventions, especially within Islamic countries. From Iraq to Afghanistan, Mali, and the Sahel and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing and Western-forced regime change in Libya, it is by now exceedingly clear that such military interventions by Western powers only breed further calls for violent extremism yet achieve virtually no result in mitigating it.

Implications for policy

Violent extremism is more than religious extremism that draws on radical Islamic theology. It can also be ethnonational and have an extremist right-wing agenda, as the cases of Bosnia and Serbia have shown. However, it also cannot be denied that during the last decades, a significant challenge has been how to deal with Islamic violent extremism. How to work with Muslim-majority societies is, therefore, a key issue. Cooperation with religious authorities, most notably with high Muslim councils, is essential both for the success of violence-mitigating activities and, more broadly, for the attainment of social buy-in. That said, non-Muslim interlocutors dealing with Muslim-majority societies should pay heed and, by and large, avoid entering the doctrinal spheres of Islam and engaging in theological change efforts. The standing of legitimately recognized Muslim bodies should be enhanced and empowered to act against violent extremism. Yet, neither the European Union nor the United States have the intricate knowledge needed to delve into efforts at theological Islamic change.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
recentglobe (March 12, 2025). “Most people are not radicalized” Global Perspectives on Resilience and Radicalization: Insights from the PREVEX Project. Global Dynamics. Retrieved April 27, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13gf4


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