GENDER DIMENSIONS IN COUNTERING VIOLENT EXTREMISM - a podcast by ALC Pan-African Radio

Transcript:
The growing threat of violent extremist groups in the Horn of Africa has seen the emergence of a wide range of security, political and development responses to the threats posed. One of them is Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism in short PCVE, A soft approach version of Counter-Terrorism. However, there is a lack of a universally accepted definition for ‘violent extremism’, which is sometimes used inaccurately as an alternative term for ‘terrorism’, which also lacks a standard definition.
Gendered analysis has over the years been central in peace and security discourse since the adoption of Security Council resolution (1325) by the UN in early 2000. However, perspectives on CVE tends to underestimate the role of women in prevention of violent extremism. Although there has been growing interest in the gendered dynamics in CVE, recent ideas have been oversimplified and mainly tend to view women’s role through binary lenses as just as mothers or wives of men engaged in CVE.
Gender dynamic is a complex process, which often intersects the formal and informal and fuses into the economic and political spheres. Moreover, understanding gender dynamics helps in providing insights on power such as gender hierarchies in the economic and political context between men and women. Gender dynamics in social-cultural norms of femininity and masculinity varies. However, it remains a key identity factor that intersects with class, ethnicity, race, or age. Notably, the analysis of gender is highly significant to understanding shifting norms, especially how gender is instrumentalized and essentialized.
It is even more important to have a deeper understanding of the role of gender plays when dealing with extremist groups like the so called Islamic State or Daesh and Al Shabaab. Without a gendered perspective in the analysis of violent extremism, policy deliberations reinforce stereotypical views of men and women: men fight and women do not. Such notions are regressive and do not improve our understanding of violent extremism, and therefore become a hindrance to our responses.

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