It Takes a Village: An Action Agenda on the Role of Civil Society in the Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Those Associated With and Affected by Violent Extremism

This report is a project document of ICCT's Engaging Civil Society in Rehabilitation project, and has been produced in collaboration with the Global Center on Cooperative Security. 

This report examines the role of civil society organisation (CSOs) in the rehabilitation and reintegration of those associated with and affected by violent extremism. It builds on the work conducted by ICCT and the Global Center on Cooperative Security, together with four subregional partners over the past two-and-a-half years in Africa and South-East Asia. The project aimed to first understand how CSOs work within their communities and with their governments to support the rehabilitation and reintegration of violent extremist offenders, victims of violence, and affected communities. It then supported the work of select CSOs by facilitating small grants to bolster existing efforts or pilot innovative approaches. The findings and lessons learned from the project have culminated in the development of this action agenda, which provides policy and programmatic recommendations for stakeholders working on rehabilitation and reintegration and the role of CSOs in supporting that process.

The project focused on three regions: the Sahel (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal); the Greater Horn of Africa (Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania, and Uganda); and Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines). While each region has its own rich experiences and unique challenges, there are overarching lessons that emerged—lessons that are applicable to a variety of rehabilitation and reintegration contexts. The action agenda therefore is not divided by region but, rather, by themes and the audiences to whom the recommendations are directed. Overall, the report consists of six guiding principles and 10 recommendations targeted to a range of audiences. Each guiding principle and recommendation is followed by examples that illustrate the ways a recommendation has been put into practice or offer suggestions for implementing a given recommendation.