February 23, 2017

CVE Was Doomed to Fail. Under Trump, It Will Get Worse

Federal countering violent extremism (CVE) programming is more likely to harm than help build trust in American communities. Though well-intentioned, the Obama administration’s CVE strategy was flawed in its conception. Continuing CVE under the Trump administration will worsen an existing problem and place a burden on local CVE partners. Absent a radical change in policy by the Trump administration, local partners ought to disassociate themselves from federal CVE programming to salvage their credibility.

In 2011, the Obama administration released a national CVE program to build a soft counterterrorism strategy. The CVE rollout called on law enforcement to work with a wide range of local partners, including educators, public health professionals, faith-based leaders, and NGO workers. Together, these actors helped law enforcement develop community activities like table-top exercises, awareness briefings, and intervention programs. Five years after the strategy’s launch, local government officials and community groups have reported increased distrust and stigmatization in several cities, including each of the CVE’s pilot cities The design of CVE strategy was doomed to fail due to three principal reasons.

First, the U.S. government lacks an interagency consensus on a definition of violent extremism and program evaluation metrics. Despite the proliferation of research on violent extremism after 9/11, the U.S. does not have a model for what causes an individual to take up violence. Moreover, CVE program design tends to draw on gang intervention studies, which offer a comparable group of individuals who may be vulnerable to violence, but also lack credible evaluation metrics. Neither CVE nor gang interventions can ensure that community partners will be able to evaluate the progress of a given participant two or three years past the program’s launch. Defining success is therefore a perennial problem for CVE programs because it is impossible to determine the point at which a potentially violent person is no longer potentially violent.

Read the full article at Small Wars Journal.

  • Podcast
    • February 4, 2025
    How Long Will Deterrence Hold?

    Mike hosts Michèle Flournoy, former Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), where she currently serves as Chair of the Board o...

    By Michèle Flournoy

  • Podcast
    • January 30, 2025
    Colombia Tariffs, Banning Chinese Drones, and Stacie Pettyjohn on Drone Warfare

    Emily and Geoff play a quick round of Tariff Tarot to dissect Trump’s tariff threats on Colombia last weekend. Then they dig in to the bipartisan debate over banning various c...

    By Emily Kilcrease, Stacie Pettyjohn & Geoffrey Gertz

  • Commentary
    • Foreign Policy
    • January 24, 2025
    Don’t Talk About the War

    Confronting aggressors and getting them to the negotiation table requires both carrots and sticks—in other words, diplomacy and military power....

    By Franz-Stefan Gady

  • Commentary
    • January 22, 2025
    Sharper: Trump's First 100 Days

    Donald Trump takes office in a complex and volatile global environment. Rising tensions with China, the continued war in Ukraine, and instability in the Middle East all pose s...

    By Charles Horn

View All Reports View All Articles & Multimedia