Research article

'Boosting resilience' and 'safeguarding youngsters at risk': Critically examining the European Commission's educational responses to radicalization and violent extremism

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Abstract

Despite the Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) being tasked with being a core policy tool of the European Union and helping to shape its research funding agenda on preventing violent extremism, very little is known about how it operates, the practices and activities it engages with and the discourses it mobilizes to do so. This study fills this gap through an in-depth investigation into RAN's working group on education, critically examining the construction and enactment of discourses and practices related to the prevention of violent extremism through education. Combining a critical engagement of organizational practices with a discourse analysis of the various RAN EDU outputs, such as manifestos, policy papers and videos, it offers an examination of the discursive terrain of the European Commission, revealing the normative values and ideological assumptions underpinning it, as well as the subject-positioning of students and teachers involved.

Keywords: PREVENTING VIOLENT EXTREMISM, COUNTERTERRORISM, RADICALIZATION, RESILIENCE, RADICALISATION AWARENESS NETWORK, EUROPEAN COMMISSION

How to Cite:

Christodoulou, E., (2020) “'Boosting resilience' and 'safeguarding youngsters at risk': Critically examining the European Commission's educational responses to radicalization and violent extremism”, London Review of Education 18(1), 18–34. doi: https://doi.org/10.18546/LRE.18.1.02