Selecting Your Activities

Your VE assessment and your Theory of Change will inform the selection of your activities. The table below provides some illustrative activity areas for identified VE drivers. This is a starting point for how to connect your activities to the push and pull factors you identified through your assessment of VE drivers.

Factor VE Drivers Illustrative P/CVE Activities
Enabling Environment
  • Weak States 
  • Poor security and/or corruption
  • Poorly governed or harshly governed areas 
  • Proactive religious agendas 
  • Both inter- and intra-religious divides 
  • State sponsorship of violent groups 
  • Training for security forces or government actors 
  • Intra- and/or interfaith dialogues
Push
  • Socioeconomic Drivers: social exclusion and marginality, societal discrimination, frustrated expectations and relative deprivation
  • Political Drivers: denial of political rights and civil liberties, harsh government repression and gross violation of human rights, foreign occupation, political and/or military encroachment, endemic corruption and impunity for well-connected elites, local conflict, discredited governments and missing or co-opted legal oppositions, intimidation or coercion by VEOs, perception that the international system is fundamentally unfair and hostile to their ethnoreligious group
  • Cultural Drivers: the feeling that one’s religion or ethnic group is under siege or broader cultural threats to traditions, customs, values and sense of collective, individual honor and dignity
  • Youth engagement and empowerment programs
  • Youth economic opportunities
  • Education
  • Engaging women in P/CVE efforts
  • Improving governance/addressing governance related grievances
  • Engaging religious actors in CVE
  • Human rights and advocacy campaigns
  • Community based development and resilience
  • Community stakeholder engagement
  • Community-oriented policing
Pull
  • Sense of belonging
  • Justification and outlet for pre-existing violent behavior
  • Existence of VE groups with a compelling narrative and attractive objectives
  • Existence of radical institutions or venues
  • Social networks and group dynamics
  • Provision of services (responding to unmet expectations and needs)
  • Material rewards, greed or the proliferation of illegal economic activities
  • Engaging family members and other influencers
  • Psychosocial support and trauma healing  
  • Counter or alternative narratives and messaging
  • Deradicalization  
  • Alternatives to incarceration for radicalized individuals/FTFs  
  • Rehabilitation of FTFs  
  • Reintegration of FTFs
  • Individual interventions

 

As you select your activities, consider: 

What is your organization’s ability to implement the activities you have selected?  

Are you currently working in a certain technical area or geographic area? If so, can you expand or change your activities to address the factors or populations you’ve identified? If not, can you expand your project areas? What would it take in order to do so? Your own organizational capacities and constraints may determine which project areas you can realistically address. 

How can you can best engage other actors to expand your impact? 

Consider the key stakeholders you should engage and how to best build strategic partnerships with other individuals, organizations, and networks to develop an expanded approach or set of activities.    

How can you ensure that your activities do no harm?  

Refer to the Cross-Cutting Section on Conflict Sensitivity for questions to ask, and worksheets to use, on how best to adapt your activities so that they avoid unintentionally increasing dividers in the community, and so that they also strengthen connectors.

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Activity Design Exercise
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Activity Design Worksheet

This worksheet will help you to design your project.

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Ensuring that You Do No Harm

Once you have completed your dividers and connectors analysis, you can apply the framework below to help you connect your analysis to your design and plan for project activities.

After prioritizing dividers and connectors (see exercise below), you can consider options and opportunities.

  • How can these dividers or connectors be changed? In other words, what are ideas to decrease/prevent those dividers and ideas to increase/support those connectors?
  • What can your team do to have a positive impact? What are you doing that is having, or could have, a negative impact? Why is that negative impact happening? What can you change to affect the impact? Understanding actions and behaviors will help inform your implementation strategy (discussed further in the Implement Module).
  • What options and opportunities are linked to the indicators you developed in Step 2 during the Dividers and Connectors assessment in the Assess Module?
  • How will you monitor changes caused by your project? This will help inform your monitoring and evaluation strategy (discussed further in the Monitor & Evaluate Module).
  • If a change does not occur, do you have another option? Do you have a process for learning why a change has not had the impact you expect? This will help inform your learning plan (discussed further in the Learn Module).
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Dividers and Connectors Prioritization Exercise
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Dividers and Connectors Prioritization Worksheet

This worksheet will guide you through this exercise.