By: Jumaina Siddiqui and Sehar Tariq
Summary
- In the last few years, there has been an increase in funding toward civil society organizations (CSOs) for the purposes of countering violent extremism (CVE).
- Donors are pushing large sums onto organizations for CVE efforts to meet their own spending targets. However, local organizations in Pakistan lack both the understanding of what drives violent extremism and the capacity to program such large amounts of funding.
- The focus and funding on CVE have increased the pressure to produce quick results, leading to short implementation time frames and ambitious targets.
- Resources should be invested to help CSOs understand and build links with previous research done by local organizations and on a comparative basis internationally so that program interventions are aligned with current research.
- Donors should focus on refining their own internal monitoring and evaluation frameworks on CVE as well as developing a standardized index and protocols for measuring the impact of CVE programs.
Introduction
As Pakistan faces internal threats from militancy and extremism, the last few years have seen an influx of funding directed toward CSOs for the purpose of countering violent extremism (CVE). The White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, which convened over seventy countries in February 2015, defined CVE as “the preventative aspects of counterterrorism as well as interventions to undermine the attraction of extremist movements and ideologies that seek to promote violence.”
Countering or preventing violent extremism requires, among other things, dismantling the extremist ideology that breeds militancy, delegitimizing groups that rely on violence to achieve their goals, introducing nonviolent forms of grievance redressal acceptable to communities, building individual resilience to social pressure to join such groups and subsequently curtailing feelings of sympathy and support for these groups within communities. These actions require a deep, nuanced understanding of local social dynamics and an understanding of how to effectively undertake these tasks in a way that is locally acceptable.