Are We Waiting for a Body Count to Take Extremism Seriously?
Over the past few months, I’ve listened to officials, experts and implementers in the Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) space voice their frustration that governments are dramatically falling behind on their responsibilities to protect citizens from potential attacks. New types of extremism – often referred to as hybrid extremism – are rapidly proliferating; from conspiracy-fueled violence around COVID-19 to online “incel” movements, to actors who mix racist, misogynistic and anti-establishment views with personal grievances or trauma. While these hybrid forms of extremism are having a dramatic societal impact, many governments in Europe and the United States are slow to appreciate – and invest in tackling – the associated risks.
There are many reasons for this lag: some brands of extremism are finding supporters in the highest echelons of governments, and more generally, P/CVE efforts are being deprioritized in the face of other international and domestic concerns. However, the consequence is the same: just when P/CVE programs and departments are in dire need of revitalization and reinvestment to understand today’s new, more complex threats, P/CVE programs are facing cuts or closure, with government teams being closed down, defunded or facing dramatically changed priorities from leadership.
Reassessing ‘Violence’ in Violent Extremism
One of the shortcomings in state efforts to combat hybrid extremism is a governmental failure to understand its complexities. Take the case of Taleb al-Abdulmohsen: in 2024, a 50-year-old Saudi-born man living in Germany drove into crowds at a Magdeburg Christmas market, killing six people and injuring 323 others. Al-Abdulmohsen was raised Muslim but is now an outspoken critic of Islam, with sympathies for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party. His case illustrates the broader and growing prevalence of extremism that defies traditional classification; his case was known to authorities, but the difficulty of classifying him arguably led to a failure to properly investigate him before he committed his act of violence.
These new complexities require prevention strategies to adapt and reconceptualize what types of extremism they target. To anyone turning on the news, the harms of right-wing, anti-gender and anti-government extremism are obvious, extensive and corrosive. A range of extremist groups and individuals have been using online gaming platforms to recruit and radicalize vulnerable users, mainly young men. Across Western Europe, investigations have been launched into far-right extremism in security forces personnel; for instance, Germany’s military intelligence agency launched investigations into 550 cases involving far-right extremism in the armed forces in 2019. Far right extremists in the US, the UK, the Netherlands and elsewhere are dramatically altering mainstream political debates, including on immigration, women and LGBTQ+ rights.
These trends may not always manifest in tragic and headline-grabbing terrorist attacks, but they are already having a huge and immediate impact on the safety and security of many people, including the LGBTQ+ community, women and People of Color. Some of this change to the mainstream debate is explicit and orchestrated: a large online, right-wing extremist network in Germany was found encouraging acts of violence against “migrants and the LGBTQ+ community.” Some of it is more subtle; a recent UNODC/UN Women report found that in 2023, around 51,100 women and girls worldwide were killed by intimate partners or family members – 140 people daily. While not all these killings are linked to organized extremist ideology, the global rise in anti-gender extremism creates an enabling environment for violence against women.
Similarly, an investigation into the racist riots in the United Kingdom in August last year, described as possibly “the worst wave of far-right violence in the UK postwar,” found that in “failing to challenge… deep-rooted narratives, and in some cases reinforcing them, the media risks fueling a tinderbox of resentment which could ignite with events in the future.” This warning became reality in September this year, when 110,000 people marched in a protest led by the openly racist British campaigner Tommy Robinson, which was filled with violence against police and counter-protestors and involved direct calls to violence against People of Color and the LGBTQ+ community. There is, then, a lot of work to do to understand these new harms and, more importantly, to understand how and when they can trigger violence.
P/CVE Systems: Broken, Underfunded – and Crucial
The need for improved P/CVE systems has never been greater, but these systems remain outdated and underfunded. For a person to be transferred to P/CVE support, the US and many European countries require evidence that they could commit actual violence. As a former US official told me bluntly: “The body count isn’t there.” Policymakers still only take violent extremism seriously when it is likely to manifest in a terrorist attack – or what has traditionally been understood as a terrorist attack. Any potential harms short of this usually remain invisible to the P/CVE system. There are obvious reasons to prioritize those who pose an immediate danger, but doing so fails to capture many of the individuals and organizations who are causing these wider societal harms. Many of the harms noted above – shifting mainstream narratives to allow resentment towards certain groups to fester and creating bias within the very security systems designed to protect citizens – will have a devastating impacts on large parts of society, but none of them would trigger a P/CVE response.
A telling example of how such a system creates gaps: the Netherlands has a number of so-called sovereign citizens, individuals who declare themselves exempt from Dutch laws and regulations, often believing in a conspiracy of an ‘evil elite’ controlling institutions. These individuals clearly cause economic and social harm: they refuse to pay their taxes or to send their children to school. Since they do not threaten direct violence against others, however, P/CVE programs cannot engage them; they are simply not violent enough. The long-term harm they cause to democracy, however, is real.
There is, then, a need to better conceptualize what constitutes ‘violence’ in P/CVE. How can we develop systems to effectively respond to hybrid and new types of extremism, while not overloading officials and practitioners working in this space? For many officials, policymakers and practitioners, none of this is new; they have been experimenting with novel ways of tackling complex extremism threats in times of sparse resources. For instance, the Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence has developed a threat-agnostic approach that avoids prescriptive guidance and recommendations on the most pressing threats in extremism. Instead, it allows practitioners to set their own priorities in a bottom-up process, maintaining a level of openness to understanding and responding to new and unexpected threats.
While these examples provide some hope, the current conditions for change are deeply unfavorable. Bibi van Ginkel, from the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), argues that “the recent, sector-wide decline in P/CVE funding, coupled with shrinking political space, is unprecedented and unsustainable.” A recent GPPi expert survey across 12 countries confirms this trend: deep funding cuts have severely hampered the sector’s ability to learn from past mistakes. As governments step away from P/CVE, the very experts central to effective policy and programming are losing their jobs or have had to end evaluations before lessons could be documented and published – a crucial step in informing future programming.
Can Governments Adapt Before the Next Attack?
Experts across the board agree: extremism is spreading at an exponential pace, especially through online networks that are increasingly detached from real-world social ties. At the same time, P/CVE systems are outdated and underfunded. Most practitioners I’ve spoken to believe that it is only a matter of time before this tinderbox of unchecked hatred, bigotry and resentment in society manifests in larger harms. This could take the form of a ‘traditional’ terror attack, or it could be a continued rise in hatred and harm against women, migrants and LGBTQ+ people.
If governments wait for body bags to justify action, they will be left scrambling to rebuild systems from scratch, but it will be far too late to address the creeping harms that are already reshaping our societies.
The challenge now is to reconceptualize harm and violence in P/CVE. We must understand how extremist ideas are eroding democratic institutions, normalizing hate and tearing apart the social fabric long before they incite large-scale violence. If P/CVE does not proactively adapt to these insidious harms, it will fail in its most basic mission: preventing extremism from leading to violence against innocent people.
