With radicalism and extremism on the rise, global think-tanks as the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund (GCERF) are trying to counter violent extremism at the most basic level. Based in Geneva, GCERF has started community-level initiatives aimed at strengthening resilience against violent extremism. In the most basic terms, this think-tank is trying to prevent people from joining violent extremist groups by finding out from the communities which they come from the reasons why someone would be inclined to join an extremist group.

The aim is to provide people who are prone to join the extremist groups an alternative option which may see their skills being used for the upliftment of their community.  This prevention strategy is being conducted through community projects and so far the project has been conducted in Bangladesh, Mali and Nigeria.

A decision has been made to include women in this equation as many women have themselves joined extremist groups. By empowering women as vectors of change, the GCERF will join other organisations that already work with women in conflict zones in order to empower women.

“We want to look at structures in power and then the relationship of men and women to that power, furthermore who gets isolated in that power structure and who could potentially cause disruption,” Madeleine Rees of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) explained at a conference in Cape Town.

WILPF is an international organisation which has a non-violent approach to attaining peace by using existing international legal and political frameworks to achieve their goals of political, economic and social justice for all. In this context, WILPF is aiding GCERF in their attempt to understand why people might be drawn to violent extremism and are seeking preventative measures with regards to this.

“We look at who has got power in the families and within society,” Rees added.

“We also look at levels of violence and access to education and employment situations and how women’s participation has an effect on government powers.”

In conflict situations, women are often seen as victims of sexual violence, however WILPF and GCERF noted that women as mothers and sisters are more likely to understand why their sons or husbands would join violent extremist organisations better than the international community.

“Women have had a huge role to play in terms of opposition,” Rees explained further.

Women themselves have joined activist groups in order to fight for freedom. This can be seen in Syria as well as in Egypt where women have rallied to oppose government forces.  WILPF works through government organisations as well as through religious institutions in order to understand the context of the situation at a ground level instead of being fed the narrative through media organisations.

“Women are the major actors on the ground… they try to hold communities together,” Rees stated.

The growth of violent extremism has been vastly covered in the news and thus these organisations have come together in order to establish a basis to understand why people have turned to it and how to prevent it from spreading further. VOC (Umarah Hartley)