The PARTICIPATION project’s two-day workshop “Understanding different extremism and radicalisation pathways and trends” took place on November 10th and 11th, 2022 in Catania (Italy).
The workshop aimed to validate and enrich the findings gathered in WP2 “Understanding different extremism and radicalisation pathways and trends” in order to focus on the different dimensions of violent extremism and radicalisation drivers and pathways, on the link between social status, values and attitudes toward extremism practices and cultures, including hate speech, and the relation between gender and radicalisation/extremism. During this workshop, external experts were involved as discussants of the deliverables already finalized and the partners, the teams of partners’ organization and auditors were involved in the discussion slots.
Overall, 73 people participated in the Workshop, including speakers and discussants.
What happened during the two-day Workshop?
The two-day workshop opened on November 10th with welcoming greetings from Rosa Loredana Cardullo, Director of the Department of Educational Sciences, University of Catania, and Liana Maria Daher – Local Coordinator of the PARTICIPATION project.
The first speech of the day was by Lorenzo Marinone from European Foundation for Democracy, who presented the main findings of the comparative research on radicalisation and violent extremism driven.
Marinone’s speech was followed by Professor Marco Lombardi (University of Catholic Heart) commentary which insisted on the necessity to adapt researchers mindset and deign new approaches to contrast radicalisation and terrorism.
After the coffee break, some of the participants including Robert Gianni (BISS Institute, Maastricht University), Kevin McDonald (Middlesex University), Vasilis Giannias (KMOP) and Fahrad Khosrokhavar (CADIS, EHESS-CNRS) joined the open discussion to share research insights and reporting findings about other approaches to the prevention of radicalisation and violent extremism.
In the afternoon, a session dedicated to “Social polarization, extremism, and radicalism: a quantitative survey” (D2.2) followed. NeclaAcik (Middlesex University) discussed wih Fahrad Khosrokhavar (CADIS, EHESS-CNRS) and Bulcsú Hunyadi (Political Capital Institute) about the result of PARTICIPATION quantitative survey on social polarization, extremism and radicalism undertaken with young people in schools in Belgium, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania, UK.
On day two of the workshop, the day opened with a session by Kevin McDonald (Middlesex University, London) who discussed about PARTICIPATION qualitative research on gender, extremism and radicalisation (D2.3) together with Dana Dolghin from University of Amsterdam and Marilena Macaluso from University of Palermo. The session was followed by an open discussion about the input used for focus groups and how to deal with the gap between researchers generation and digital natives.
After launch, Robert Gianni (BISS Institute, Maastricht University) presented the rountable session hosting some of the most interesting active projects on preventing and contrasting violent extremism and radicalisation.
Santina Musolino and Valeria Rosato, University Roma 3, presented the findings of the PARTICIPATION project followed by Davide Lauretta from European Foundation for Democracy, who shared about the Euroguide project. Thereafter, Dana Dolghin spoke about the CHAMPION project on behalf of PATRIR. The roundtable collected also a presentation on the CEAR project by Guido Savasta (CESIE), a digression on the TRUST project by Giuseppe Dentice from CESI and a short introduction of the MIRAD project by Vasilis Giannias.
The workshop closed with concluding remarks by Liana Daher on the lesson learned during the event. In particular, she focused on the importance to find new model to address radicalisation and involve young people as key protagonists in the prevention paths.
