Citation

Neyroud P, Aziz A, Kubicek B. Campbell Syst. Rev. 2024; 20(2): e1387.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2024, The Authors, Publisher John Wiley and Sons with the Campbell Collaboration)

DOI

10.1002/cl2.1387

PMID

38434538

PMCID

PMC10903185

Abstract

The Campbell Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) evidence synthesis programme is a global research initiative focused on using rigorous and relevant evidence to inform policy and practice. The programme was designed to produce and publish a series of high-quality Campbell systematic reviews and evidence maps in priority areas agreed in consultation with the Five Research and Development (5RD) Countering Violent Extremism Network (CVEN). This multilateral partnership of government home affairs/interior departments from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States aims to share scientific research and evidence-based knowledge to ensure that participant nations are better prepared to divert individuals from radicalisation to violent extremism and terrorism, to prevent individuals from carrying out attacks, to mitigate the impact of violent extremist and terrorist events, and to develop community and individual resilience to these kinds of targeted, grievance-fuelled violence. This multilateral partnership is able to bring in other bilateral (e.g., Sweden) and multilateral (e.g., Five Country Ministerial) entities to help collectively expand the adoption of evidence-based approaches to countering violent extremism.

The CVEN was established in 2015 to provide a forum to enable broad-ranging cooperative Research, Development, Test & Evaluation (RDT&E) among public safety and security entities with a goal of connecting efforts from within governments, academia, and the private sector to enable forward-thinking CVE, and terrorism and threat prevention, while leveraging global expertise in a single forum. On side of other fields of violence and harm prevention, the field of CVE is still relatively new. Further, given the focus on low frequency, high-consequence events, the field has had challenges in building up data and evidence to support the assessment of trends, risks, needs, vulnerabilities and protective factors, as well as for evaluating what approaches to prevention work for whom in what context. As such, a central aim for the CVEN is to support coordinated investment to address these gaps, and raise the bar on standards of evidence and practice.

The partnership between CVEN and the Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Coordinating group has run for 4 years, with four cycles of topic development and commissioning of reviews. This time commitment has enabled a learning process in how to bring systematic evidence reviews into a relatively nascent field of prevention, with innovations including to develop protocols for reviewing qualitative studies, a key step given the importance of context in the design and implementation of CVE programmes. The long-term commitment is also helping ensure that the growing number of empirical studies relevant for CVE have a stronger foundation on which to build. In the sections below, we present main findings of the key Campbell reviews which have been completed and published so far. ...

Language: en