Preventing Violent Extremism in Kenya through Value Complexity: Assessment of Being Kenyan Being Muslim
Khan, Anjum, Jose Liht, and Sara Savage. 2014. Journal of Strategic Security 7, no. 3: 1-26.
This source is an academic paper published by three researchers from the University of Cambridge: Sara Savage of the Psychology and Religion Research Group as well as Anjum Khan and Dr. Jose Liht of the IC Thinking Departmental Research Group. The article summarises the results of the first field trial of Being Kenyan Being Muslim, a deradicalisation program targeting individuals vulnerable to insurgent recruitment that exposes participants to the multiplicity of value priorities which violent extremist organisations (VEOs) seek to challenge. Despite its focus on the phenomenon of extremist groups, numerous parallels can be drawn between the employment of narratives by VEOs and other polarised factions in conflict. The power of such narratives lies in their simplicity, explaining the social world as arrayed against an individual’s in-group and offering a pathway to belonging, significance, and a means to address grievances. This simplified worldview results in a decreased level of integrative complexity (IC), a measure of one’s ability to differentiate and integrate multiple perspectives on an issue. Low integrative complexity levels are visible across discourses which precede conflict, with the goal of IC interventions being not to alter an individual’s beliefs but how they think. Despite its technical subject matter, this source offers a comprehensive and accessible summary of an IC intervention. The process began by building an individual’s capacity for differentiation, the ability to perceive multiple viewpoints, before progressing to value pluralism exercises, in which participants practice considering the validity in the values of opposing viewpoint without sacrificing their own principles. Finally, the intervention concludes with an integration exercise, to strengthen one’s capacity to identify linkages between different viewpoints and comprehend why reasonable people can maintain different perspectives. Such interventions are shown to result in a notable increase in participant integrative complexity, offering a proven, low-cost means to addressing the underlying psychological factors that can pull individuals towards polarising ideologies and exacerbate conflict.
Link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26465191