Preventing extremism
Extremism prevention intends to raise awareness of the occurrence of extremism and the problem of radicalization. Causes for radicalisation are numerous and diverse. Radicalisation is an outcome of a complex interaction between structural factors and grievances. Moreover, radicalisation is a process of socialisation. Better understanding of the occurrence and social exchange on the matter pave the way to more informed and equipped societies.
Program engages in exploration of socio-legal design through consideration of social phenomena, social relations, social institutions, and social space. Individuals are prepared to become enabled democratic participants within their social position in society and to fulfil a certain social role in legal sphere. Introduced is an ideation aimed at generation of understanding of instances with high importance for exhibition of initiative and active position. There is a significant need for presence, acknowledgement, recognition, and validation of certain ways of expression and of all societal participants for creation and preservation of safe, pleasant, and enabling social spaces.
Cultivation of legal consciousness is an integral part of the process of legal socialisation. Forms of societal consciousness do not exist in isolation from each other, rather in organic connection with each other. Thus, social interaction requires skills for socio-legal self-regulation. Sphere of confluence of motivations and needs requires alignment with abilities for self-determination and self-regulation of own behaviour. In addition, it requires possession of sustainable skills of interaction with public institutions that fulfill normative, relational, regulatory, sociocultural, and integrative functions. Preventing extremism introduces better understanding of these social complexity and equips to better approach social participation.
Communities as a whole and particular groups within communities face adverse circumstances and vulnerabilities. Community coping mechanism should be available and accessible, and all should know how to navigate them. Resilience occurs out of risk or adversity met with adaptivity.
Causes for radicalisation are numerous and diverse. Independent factors are insufficient to result in radicalisation. Radicalisation is an outcome of a complex interaction between factors. Causal external factors such as political, economic, historical, cultural, psychological conditions need to catch an individual in a position that is vulnerable to narratives for radicalisation to occur. There is also a consideration for such structural factors as geopolitical, historic, biographic details. There is a variety of responses and behaviours that causal external factors, individual position, and structural factors can generate. People address grievances through passive and active strategies, protest and helpful behaviour, individual and collective approaches, normative and non-normative outlooks.
Program provides familiarisation with the process of socialisation through discussion of identity and identification; peripheral and central thinking; functions of social institutions; macro-, meso-, micro- levels of socialisation; socially controlled and spontaneous socialisation.
Furthermore, in-group and out-group perceptions, stereotypes, exclusivist attitudes and behaviours, and broader interpersonal and intergroup dynamics are discussed. Intergroup perception and interpretation occur out of interpretation of self in relation to others. This interpretation becomes interlaced with group identification. This is an intricate process. Interactions among people are affective, cognitive, behavioural, and structural. People make sense of each other on all those levels.
Meaning production makes social experiences suspended in constant self-organisation in time. Alternatively, people’s experiences are a bad eternity, void of substance, that results in crisis of identity. Not only this becomes detrimental to socio-economic development of individuals, in more detailed examination this means depriving individuals of development and endangering individuals through infliction of loss of identity. Life’s meaning reminds a matrix that structures psychological experience of an individual and wrapped into a sense of dynamic connection of own life with historical and social time. Quite often meaning of life can be seen as an element of structuring identity in a process of lifecreativity.
Realities of synchronic and diachronic conflicts in socio-economic experiences, exclusion and not belonging, gender-based humiliation, societal and employment discrimination and lack of support are given additional attention in the program.
People assess discrimination based on primary and secondary considerations. To what extent does discrimination contradict their values and obstacles achievement of important goals? How capable are they to cope with discrimination? Answering those two questions people decide upon their coping strategy to address their problem-oriented and emotion-oriented needs. Through returning to understanding of people’s meaning production, sense making, and future orientation the program looks at the grievances and voids – the external factors, individual position, and structural factors – as well as potential generated responses and behaviours and how can lifecreativity be continued in a positive way rather than negative radicalised trajectory. People who feel threatened, feel loss of dignity, feel loss of their place and position are vulnerable to negative or extreme propositions as strategies of addressing their grievances.
Preventing extremism tries, in concise time, to deep dive into ideological interpretations and their understanding based on the knowledge shaped in the initial part of the program, and instil the ability to reason through propaganda, narratives, and myths. With motivational and semantic structure and the discussion of the independent decision making as an ability to fully regulate own actions in conditions of psychological pressure as an aesthetic process of lifecreativity in mind; since radicalisation is a process of socialisation the program concludes with image creation, sketch of the future, prospects for personal development, and embodiment of personal values.