Description
Scholars have increasingly examined how policies aimed at preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) have been co-opted to justify authoritarian practices and promote assimilationist agendas. Similarly, research within the fields of Critical Studies on Terrorism (CST) and authoritarian diffusion recently found the role of counter-terrorism policies in suppressing human rights. Despite this, a systematic framework to analyse P/CVE as a mechanism sustaining authoritarian and illiberal governance remains absent.
This paper seeks to fill that gap by conceptualising P/CVE practices as illiberal prescriptions shared by the rulers and the ruled to stabilise the regime through elites’ legitimising discourses, regulative policy measures, and the coerced or voluntary compliance of non-state actors under the banner of countering vaguely defined “extremism.” Additionally, this paper aims to understand the drivers of illiberal P/CVE practices in non-Western contexts.
To do so, drawn from norm diffusion and international (human rights) law, the paper proposes an original analytical framework. This framework categorises political discourse, legislation, law enforcement, and civil society participation into “liberal” and “illiberal” P/CVE through 41 indicators. Using a most-different-systems design (MDSD), it explores the conditions fostering illiberal P/CVE across case studies in Bangladesh, China, Somaliland, and Nigeria.
As one of the few comparative analyses of P/CVE in non-Western settings, the study makes significant empirical contributions. It also makes theoretical contributions by bridging CST, P/CVE, and authoritarian diffusion literature, shedding light on how illiberal leaders exploit counter-extremism as a toolkit for repressing dissent and curtailing human rights.
