Building Resilience to Social Harms (Including Violent Extremism)

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Our Current Projects

Mapping codesign and codelivery of CVE initiatives in Victoria: lessons learned to tackle emerging violent extremist threats 

In the past few years Australia, like many other parts the world, has seen an upsurge in racial and religious exclusivism, conspiracy theories and deliberate misinformation, alienation from elected representatives, declining trust in government and non-government institutions, inter-community discord, misogyny, racism, social polarisation, and the intensification and spread of extremism messaging and action. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these trends. 

Government initiatives are likely to be less successful where communities have not been seen as trusted partners with agency to design their own outcomes. Increasingly government agencies have therefore base policy and program development based on “empowerment” and “co-design” collaboration and participation. How effective is this approach, in helping to build a resilient and inclusive society, where trust between agencies and communities is under strain. 

The project is designed to work with up to three pilot communities to investigate and understand activities, processes and structures that enable or hinder individuals and communities in engaging fully with civil society and democratic processes, including factors that undermine trust in civil society or increases social polarisation. 

One aim of this project is the initiate work on a “trust lab” that will explore the benefits to policy making and delivery of reciprocal relationships between government and community actors. 

Mapping codesign and codelivery of CVE initiatives in Victoria: lessons learnt to tackle emerging violent extremist threats  

The core of building resilient and inclusive societies is for local communities to develop customised approaches based on their own understanding of the risks with which they live and the assets and capacities they bring to coping with challenge, threat, and adversity. 

Co-design is based on the understanding that building increasingly self-aware and self-mobilising communities will, in the future, see a reduction in reliance on Government led top-down intervention to complex social policy issues.  

While Government remains an important actor in countering these trends, policies and programs from the past few years shows that community capacity building is likely to have a more sustained impact. 

The project will map (to the extent that government agencies, for security reasons, permit) the current body of work on co-design and co-delivery of CVE interventions in Victoria. This project will leverage the lessons learnt from these initiatives to inform responses to emerging violent extremist threats and a nation-leading Victorian CVE co-design framework.  

Our Completed projects

Tackling Hate

Contact Zones: Understanding recruitment processes to violent extremism in comparative domains

Crisis Points: Extremism under a state of emergency

Trust Flows: Understanding trust flows to build resilient PVE partnerships between communities and government

 

Mapping Intervention Capacity in Preventing and Countering Right Wing Extremism in Victoria

Objects for Everyday Resilience

 
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Publications

 

 

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