Stijn Sieckelinck (1980, Belgium) is a senior researcher at the Institute for Societal Resilience at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Coordinator of the expert lab on Resilient Identities, he holds a PhD in Social Educational Theory.

Research and consultancy interests lie in the broad field of education, governance and professionalisation, with a particular focus on radicalisation, conflict resolution and citizenship education. He is the author of Transforming schools into labs for democracy.

2020 Conference: crossing boundaries to build resilience

The imperative to understand and address violent radicalisation is brought into stark relief by recent world events, with attacks against a demonised “other” being a tragically prevalent feature of our news cycles. Yet, it is clear that reactive security measures will never be sufficient to address the issues at hand. It is in this light that, in 2016, the EU ministers responsible for youth affairs agreed on exploring a pedagogical approach to understanding and tackling violent radicalisation, as evidenced in Stephens,

Sieckelinck and Boutellier (2019), ‘Preventing violent extremism: A review of the literature’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.

Recently, researchers began exploring the efforts of practitioners and policymakers to build resilience to violent extremism and polarisation. This research has examined formal and non-formal contexts of upbringing and civic education, and has supported a diverse range of practices in their efforts to build resilience, in collaboration with local partners. The extensive experiences generated by such grassroots practices in Europe and beyond has given rise to valuable insights and pointed to important challenges.

See, for example, Stephens and Sieckelinck (2019), ‘Being resilient to radicalisation in PVE policy: A critical examination’, Critical Studies on Terrorism.

At the same time, policymakers have been taking diverse approaches in trying to address this issue. The conference ‘Crossing boundaries to build resilience’ provided an opportunity to learn from this collective experience, and to meet around the questions and challenges facing practitioners and policymakers alike. Crossing boundaries is a central theme in this endeavour: bringing together diverse practitioners and policymakers, the challenges, and successes, of collaborating across disciplines and sectors will be examined along the lines of this most recent (forthcoming) paper: Stephens and Sieckelinck (forthcoming),

‘Working across boundaries in preventing violent extremism: Towards a typology for collaborative arrangements in PVE policy’, Journal for Deradicalisation.

At the same time, it will seek to push the boundaries of our ideas about prevention: what is the potential of a preventive outlook? What are the limits of such an outlook? Can the initial phase of radicalisation be approached more affirmatively than a preventive outlook currently allows?

To address these questions together, a unique international conference will be organised on 16-17 April 2020 in Amsterdam, hosted by the Vrije Universiteit and aimed at professionals, policymakers and researchers in the interdisciplinary subfield of Preventing Violent Extremism. Do you feel like you are able to make a valuable contribution? Save the date and sign up.