Finding the right mix: re-evaluating the road to gender-equality in countering violent extremism programming

The adoption of gender mainstreaming strategies has become an increasingly common expectation within countering terrorism and violent extremism policy and programming. Through comparative case study examination of two iterations of a Strengthening Resilience to Violent Extremism programme, this article shows that practitioners are often left struggling to design effective and transformative strategies that can overcome practical and conceptual barriers. This is due to several intersecting and compounding elements, including institutional conceptual limitations around gender and gender equality in the security context, a weak evidence base on how and why gender plays a role in violent extremism, and a lack of effective feminist knowledge transfer and co-creation processes between academic and practitioner researchers.