Floods of funds and political investment in so-called radicalisation issues may have created more money making, career planning, attention seeking and power struggling than anything else. The implementation of Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) programs shows the kind of selfishness, opportunism, elitism and sometimes even greed which is a significant but little acknowledged element of our liberal societies. In other words, has this prevent industry embarked on the usual paths of neo-liberal business making while expressing unabashed pride about the virtues of western liberal democracy – thus indirectly fuelling all kinds of resentment, intolerance and violent extremisms and making our democracies even more vulnerable than they already are? Are PVE programs and the prevention industry around them part of the problem rather than of the solution?
Last year I published an essay on the European Commission’s Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN), in it I expressed some personal observations which I made during my voluntary engagement since 2011 in building up the RAN as a bottom-up network of experienced field practitioners in Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE). The RAN is still often called a “bottom-up” “first-line practitioners” network – and proudly claims that thousands of such practitioners are part of it. In some ways it also looks and acts like “bottom-up” – which is why I had called it “the best thing of its kind” in my previous essay. However, in key aspects the RAN seemed to act in quite converse ways, i.e. as a top-down, state-driven and state-controlled initiative which is subject to many influences and directives that are other and more powerful than those of the actual field practitioners who do the prevent work on the ground – know this work best and are in need of support and recognition.
My observations were entirely subjective, of course, not having access to much objective information – which is why I wrote an essay and also brought my semi-fictional friend John A. Cranky into it, to make the read livelier and a bit more enjoyable. Since Cranky, an excellent practitioner who tended to be quite grumpy and harsh in his personal life, would make off-comments like: “The RAN, that’s just a bunch of power hungry money makers and career planners” which was not true, of course – but quite authentic, expressed some atmospheric issues at the time.
