Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs and policies are being developed and implemented across the country. CVE is being criticized by various community leaders and members due to its inherent criminalizing nature as it is currently put into place by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). By exploring the various meanings of community in a multicultural community, various processes and practices can come to be analyzed as ways to prevent violent extremism without oversight from the DOJ and the DHS. Metro Detroit is a multicultural community that experiences statistically low levels of radicalization of community members who legitimize violent extremism. Even such cases can be delegitimized when considering the circumstances in which they exist. When examining the community cohesion that exists in Metro Detroit through various organizations, especially interfaith organizations, it becomes apparent that there is a strong attempt to create a cohesive community. The argument is not that community cohesion automatically leads to the absence of violent extremism, but that community cohesion builds relationships and practices so that potential causes for violent extremism can be addressed, lessened or diminished. It is suggested that the support of strengthening community cohesion in terms of CVE be dismantled from the DHS and the DOJ. Restructuring would best be supported as a joint effort between the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, all of which are better equipped to deal with the causes of violent extremism. / Master of Arts

Thesis advisor: Jonathan Laurence / In the decade following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, global focus has shifted towards analyzing how to combat terrorism. "Countering Violent Extremism" policies, or CVE, emerged as a means to combat the growing threat of extremist attacks against Western and Western-backed governments around the world. CVE promotes the use of deradicalization and integration techniques to develop trust in communities considered "at-risk" of becoming radicalized and executing extremist attacks. Problematically, CVE policies have been adopted and adored without having been scrutinized. I consider three historical cases of policies very similar to CVE, in France, Great Britain, and the United States, and analyze how CVE may distract from a concerning trend towards immigration, law enforcement, and military action instead of meaningful engagement. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Politicaql Science.

Today’s modern, Canadian, business corporations are hugely influential in determining public policy and many aspects of people’s lives. Because this influence permeates so much of our social construct, we expect corporations to act in an ethical manner. Yet, at the very baseline of legal incorporation, there is not a requirement for corporations, per se, to be ethical or to act in an ethical manner. This situation has set up a form of ethical dualism, with individual citizens being required to act in certain prescribed manners, while corporations, which in most cases comprise individual citizens, are allowed to ignore or even to flaunt similar ethical rules and standards. In this investigative paper on corporate applied ethics, I will examine arguments for and against the notion of including ethical responsibility statements within the concept of incorporation. This paper will provide a historical framework in which to view some of the complexities involved, and examine certain influential assertions made by Milton Friedman. The paper will begin with a look at what is meant by corporation in this context. This will be followed by an analysis of the arguments put forward by Milton Friedman in his famous essay “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits” and other related arguments. These other arguments, as objections to the inclusion of ethics within the notion of corporation, fall into three main types: objections to concept; to ability; and to process. I will review each in turn, with the hope that, by dispelling the Friedmanian arguments against corporate ethical inclusion, a new baseline for incorporation might be established. The second part of the paper will examine what kind of ethics might best suit the corporation. It will also consider ethical growth with respect to business. The paper will conclude with a suggestion as to how the inclusion of ethics within the notion of incorporation might be accomplished.

Today’s modern, Canadian, business corporations are hugely influential in determining public policy and many aspects of people’s lives. Because this influence permeates so much of our social construct, we expect corporations to act in an ethical manner. Yet, at the very baseline of legal incorporation, there is not a requirement for corporations, per se, to be ethical or to act in an ethical manner. This situation has set up a form of ethical dualism, with individual citizens being required to act in certain prescribed manners, while corporations, which in most cases comprise individual citizens, are allowed to ignore or even to flaunt similar ethical rules and standards. In this investigative paper on corporate applied ethics, I will examine arguments for and against the notion of including ethical responsibility statements within the concept of incorporation. This paper will provide a historical framework in which to view some of the complexities involved, and examine certain influential assertions made by Milton Friedman. The paper will begin with a look at what is meant by corporation in this context. This will be followed by an analysis of the arguments put forward by Milton Friedman in his famous essay “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits” and other related arguments. These other arguments, as objections to the inclusion of ethics within the notion of corporation, fall into three main types: objections to concept; to ability; and to process. I will review each in turn, with the hope that, by dispelling the Friedmanian arguments against corporate ethical inclusion, a new baseline for incorporation might be established. The second part of the paper will examine what kind of ethics might best suit the corporation. It will also consider ethical growth with respect to business. The paper will conclude with a suggestion as to how the inclusion of ethics within the notion of incorporation might be accomplished.

CVE is complex. It requires combatting the narratives and ideology of many extremist groups around the globe, constructing environments with appealing alternatives to extremism, and most importantly, sensitivity to the variety of circumstances in which CVE takes place to effectively battle the root causes of extremism. Constructing a complete CVE effort thus requires a great variety of skills, coordinated to efficient implementation. Despite notional commitment, U.S. CVE abroad lacks interagency coordination. JIATF-S offers a strong model of interagency coordination, from which lessons may be applied to the formation of an interagency CVE effort. Interagency coordination would bring extensive expertise and resources to bear on CVE operations.

A holistic approach to Counter Violent Extremism (CVE) in the Internet Environment and Social Media is essential. This thesis focuses on gender and context consideration in online approaches to CVE through use of a literature review and samples of online counter-narrative campaigns. This has led to determination of the extent to which gender and context have been considered in online approaches to CVE and identifying what they mean for CVE online, while highlighting full participation of women in online approaches that are aimed at countering violent extremism as well as the critical role of contextual factors in online approaches to CVE. In addition, the thesis shows that more research is needed to fill the gaps identified. These gaps are the role of women in online CVE campaigns as well as contextual factors that are associated to violent extremism. More so, online narratives should be all rounded since this study found that CVE narratives have failed to identify a predictable psychosocial trajectory to explain de-radicalization processes that are crucial to disengage radicals.

Hateful content and offensive language are commonplace on social media platforms. Many surveys prove that high percentages of social media users experience online harassment. Previous efforts have been made to detect and remove online hate content automatically. However, removing users' content restricts free speech. A complementary strategy to address hateful content that does not interfere with free speech is to counter the hate with new content to divert the discourse away from the hate. In this dissertation, we complement the lack of previous work on counterhate arguments by analyzing and detecting them. Firstly, we study the relationships between hateful tweets and replies. Specifically, we analyze their fine-grained relationships by indicating whether the reply counters the hate, provides a justification, attacks the author of the tweet, or adds additional hate. The most obvious finding is that most replies generally agree with the hateful tweets; only 20% of them counter the hate. Secondly, we focus on the hate directed toward individuals and detect authentic counterhate arguments from online articles. We propose a methodology that assures the authenticity of the argument and its specificity to the individual of interest. We show that finding arguments in online articles is an efficient alternative compared to counterhate generation approaches that may hallucinate unsupported arguments. Thirdly, we investigate the replies to counterhate tweets beyond whether the reply agrees or disagrees with the counterhate tweet. We analyze the language of the counterhate tweet that leads to certain types of replies and predict which counterhate tweets may elicit more hate instead of stopping it. We find that counterhate tweets with profanity content elicit replies that agree with the counterhate tweet. This dissertation presents several corpora, detailed corpus analyses, and deep learning-based approaches for the three tasks mentioned above.

The preoccupation in the past decades with theorizing radicalization in order to prevent violent extremism has left deradicalization undertheorized. As the number of returning Foreign Terrorist Fighters (FTFs) is expected to increase as a result of the anticipated military and intelligence advancement on terrorism, the reintegration imperative stresses the urgency to develop comprehensive reintegration and deradicalization strategies. This study seeks to contribute to filling the research deficit begging for empirical data informed by FTFs’ experiences of, and challenges in, reintegration, through qualitative interviews with returning FTFs in Kwale County, Kenya; a county producing a relative majority of Kenyan recruits to Al Shabaab who are now offered amnesty on return to their county of origin. The Life Psychology framework, which assumes an inherent human strive to obtain a good life, i.e. life embeddedness, is adopted for the analysis. The study finds that returnees commit to reintegration in the absence of other alternatives, due to economic incentives and longing for acceptance. It confirms that the process requires the societal motivation in facilitation, but will fail without the sustained commitment of the returning FTF. The study further establishes that returning FTFs are not able to obtain a flow in life embeddedness, which would indicate inability to reintegrate. Yet, many of the interviewed returning FTFs express the contrary, which challenges the concept of life embeddedness as an indicator for reintegration. The study further challenges the general assumption that deradicalization is a precondition for reintegration, as it finds that radicalized individuals are able to reintegrate into communities of origin without deserting held radical beliefs, if those communities share radical sentiments. This study contributes to filling the deficit in empirical data, which when advanced will work to avert security threats posed by returning FTFs and enable utilizing the potential of the phenomenon to counter violent extremism.

Author: Giorgi Kaishauri Study programme: International Security Studies Master's thesis: EU-wide CVE Programs: Exploring the Gap between Theory and Practice Abstract The aim of this research was to determine congruence between the EU-initiated P/CVE program, CT MORSE, and prominent theoretical and empirical insights present in the academic literature on P/CVE. This research presents an exploratory qualitative study which employs a deductive approach to explore a potential gap between counter-radicalization theory and counter- radicalization practice as observed in a major EU project. The data collected and analyzed in this research suggests a partial correlation between academic insights and project's activities. Three out of eight determinants of effective P/CVE strategy discussed in the literature - community engagement, community resilience, and the role of women, are fully accounted for by the project, while the other three - dialogue, identity formation, and personnel expertise are partially present in the form of their constituting elements. Individual resilience and inclusion of former radicals receive neither implicit, nor explicit focus in the project's undertakings across the globe. Moreover, the data suggests that existing congruence is not completely arbitrary, however, a substantially deeper...

No description available.