Context and Objectives

The field of prevention of violent extremism is relatively new, having experienced significant growth since the 2000s in the wake of a string of attacks that shook the international community. As a result, the actors in the field, especially the practitioners, had to initially base their practices on literature that was either almost absent or had a significant number of conceptual, empirical, and practical inconsistencies.

In relatively new areas of research and practice, such as the field of PVE, it is rarely possible to generate evidence-based guidelines due to a lack of studies of high methodological quality capable of distinguishing the effective from the less effective. Researchers are therefore advised to combine available (albeit imperfect) scientific evidence and expert opinion using consensus-building methods. The main objective of consensus methods is to define levels of agreement on controversial subjects, particularly when there is insufficient or too much information.

In order to contribute to the development of practice guidelines in the field of PVE – an area with relatively little empirical literature – CPN-PREV conducted three systematic reviews on online radicalization, primary and secondary PVE programs, and tertiary PVE programs, and generated recommendations according to the results of these reviews. Then, experts and practitioners from multiple sectors and countries were invited to a consensus conference in 2019, where they were offered the opportunity to discuss and refine CPN-PREV’s recommendations in order to transform them into practice guidelines. Finally, a three-wave Delphi process was set up to anonymously evaluate the guidelines generated during the consensus conference.