Kwa Pamoja Tuzuie Balaa: Preventing Radicalisation and Terrorist Recruitment (PREACT)
RUSI has partnered with Search for Common Ground to work on a project seeking to strengthen community-led P/CVE responses and build trust between communities and government to address radicalisation and recruitment. The work is conducted in collaboration with Kenya’s National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC).
In partnership with Search for Common Ground (SFCG) and community-based organisations Ijara Women for Peace (IWP) and the Kiyunga Youth Bunge Initiative (KYBI), RUSI is working on a 24-month project with the goal of empowering community leaders and relevant government counterparts to jointly address issues of violent extremist organisation radicalisation and recruitment in at-risk areas of Lamu and Garissa counties.
As part of this project, RUSI leads research on the locus of trust in target communities and monitors and analyses threat trends in project communities to inform community-led multi-stakeholder dialogues on security issues. Select community forums will be facilitated by RUSI and offer P/CVE capacity building training for community members.
Aims and objectives
Ranked 21st out of 138 countries in the 2019 Global Terrorism Index, Kenya has continued to experience an onslaught of VE attacks in recent years, perpetrated by the Al-Qaeda-affiliated, Somalia-based extremist group al-Shabaab as well as affiliates and local actors working on behalf of AS. Many of the attacks have been carried out in Lamu and Garissa Counties. In response to the dynamic between communities and government actors (including security forces), momentum around community-led peace and security solutions is growing, supported by research and practice.
With this project, RUSI and project partners aim to strengthen community-led, CVE-relevant support and response structures in at-risk communities and work to increase trust and collaboration between community members and relevant local government and security actors in at-risk areas within Garissa and Lamu Counties in Kenya.
In an effort to anchor the project in evidence rather than assumptions, RUSI is leading one research component of the project. This includes research on an exploration of the obstacles for reporting suspicious and suspected violent extremism-related activities to relevant local authorities. This research will inform the project’s multi-stakeholder dialogues and contribute to the evidence base preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) policy and programming.
RUSI will also lead on providing bi-annual reporting on violence monitoring in each county to include threat context analysis. This reporting will inform project activities aimed at increasing trust between communities and local authorities.