Official website of the Department of Homeland Security
DHS S&T OSAI in partnership with the National Institute of Building Sciences developed a set of best practices and a new online tool, Best Practices for Anti-Terrorism Security (BPATS), for building owners to evaluate their operations end-to-end before applying for SAFETY Act protections.
The Five Country Research and Development (5RD) Terrorism Prevention Meeting was hosted by the United Kingdom Home Office’s Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT), in London, UK, September 10-13, 2018.
To counter the continually growing and changing threat of violent extremism, DHS S&T has developed a free and publicly accessible research findings dashboard that hosts more than 1,500 cataloged terrorism prevention and countering violent extremism research documents.
Past local terrorism prevention programs did not undergo robust, independent evaluation. To redress this gap, at the request of the DHS Office of Terrorism Prevention Partnerships (OTPP), the Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) was looked upon to collaborate with subject matter experts in the field to study these programs’ effectiveness in delivering information about what does and does not work in the prevention space.
Neither international borders nor a single ideology constrains or limits threats posed by terrorism, domestic radicalization, or returning foreign fighters. Accordingly, many countries have invested in research within their local contexts to build the global body of evidence in terrorism prevention. However, this research is often inaccessible to intended end users, many of whom cannot effectively retrieve the research or analyze it for operational needs.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), in coordination with the Five Country Research and Development (5RD) Terrorism Prevention Network, identified a need to conduct systematic reviews of prior research and evaluations.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) developed a comprehensive and publicly available literature review and ontology dashboard to organize CVE literature. This new capability streamlines the ability for end users and practitioners to access peer-reviewed and methodologically sound research products to develop an evidence base in the field of terrorism prevention for what works, what doesn’t, and why.
This study asked members of the Somali‐American community in Minneapolis‐St. Paul to describe the challenges of living in a refugee community, how violent extremists try to exploit their condition for recruitment purposes, and what resources and strategies are needed to minimize their vulnerability. Using ethnographic methods, this study looked at the everyday lives of Somali‐American adolescent boys and young men in the context of their families and communities.
Since 2010, the U.S. government has invested more than $20 million into understanding all forms of radicalization to violence, as well as effective prevention and intervention measures. DHS S&T and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) are at the forefront of this work.
DHS S&T developed a comprehensive and publicly available literature review and ontology dashboard to organize CVE literature. This new capability streamlines the ability for end users and practitioners to access peer-reviewed and methodologically sound research products to develop an evidence base in the field of terrorism prevention for what works, what doesn't, and why.
In order to move beyond the existing push/pull framework to understand disengagement, we apply a systematic coding scheme derived from Mayer and colleagues’ integrative model of organizational trust to examine why people leave extremist groups. In doing so, we also rely on in-depth life history interviews with twenty former left- and right-wing extremists to examine whether antecedents of distrust vary between the two groups. Findings suggest substantial similarities and important differences between left- and right-wing extremists’ decision to leave. In particular, perceptions of poor planning and organization, low-quality personnel and vindictive behavior generate perceptions of organizational distrust and disillusionment. Although findings from the current study are based on a relatively small sample, notable similarities were identified between both groups regarding sources of distrust (e.g., leaders, group members). We also identified differences regarding the role of violence in weakening solidarity and nurturing disillusionment with extremist activities. We conclude this article with suggestions for future research that extend the study of terrorism and that may have significance for how practitioners address countering violent extremism initiatives.
