Maintaining Inclusion in the Shadow of Terrorism, Radicalization and Populism

Terrorist events in the name of radical religious doctrines have occurred worldwide. While scholars have carefully investigated engagement in terrorism and violence at the macro scale, there is still little research approaching policy treatments at the micro level despite the fact that many localized inclusion efforts have been developed. This project, a collaboration between two French institutions (the Université d’Artois and the research laboratory LEM-CNRS) and Stanford University, seeks to assess the success of one of these policy treatments. A structured tool developed with an NGO constitutes a training curriculum on the prevention of violence using role-playing sessions administered on adolescents. The tool highlights the Education for Citizenship and International Solidarity (ECIS] program developed in Europe. The goal is to contribute to the reduction of extremist values among young people from ethnic-minority and low-income backgrounds in West Africa and in France. Surveying the participants exposed to this tool, this project will evaluate the impact of the ECIS tool to ameliorate extremist views among young people from ethnic-minority and low-income backgrounds in France and in West Africa. It will then seek to adapt the tool for application in other countries facing terrorist attacks such as the U.S. France/Stanford funds will support collaborative meetings in Lille and at Stanford.