As part of the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s PeaceCon 2023, XCEPT are part of a panel event. This panel will provide insights on how development practitioners and policy-makers can use existing evidence on the drivers of violent extremism to design effective prevention interventions that aim at reducing conflict and contributing to building peace.

The panel will present what behavioural science tells us about what makes somebody willing to engage in violent extremism for their values – and what might turn individuals away from embarking on a path to radicalisation. UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) and Chemonics will integrate learning from community-based programmes to PVE in Pakistan and Burkina Faso.

Virtual

5 May 2023, 11:30 – 12:45 (BST)

Register

Moderator

  • Aliya Souhaid is the XCEPT Senior Manager at Chemonics UK

Panellists

  • Nika Saeedi is the Deputy Resident Representative of the UNDP Uzbekistan Country Office. She has also been leading UNDP’s Prevention of Violent Extremism work as part of the Conflict Prevention, Peacebuilding and Responsive Institutions (CPPRI) team. She is serving as the UNDP Global Focal Point on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS), Religion, Hate Speech, and Digital Peacebuilding. She also led a global discussion that raised awareness on the importance of the use of Behaviour Science in effective and evidence-based prevention of violence for the promotion of diversity and inclusion of minorities.
  • Dr Nafees Hamid is Director of Research and Policy for the Cross-border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) programme team at King’s College London and a Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR). Dr Hamid’s research includes ethnographic interviews, survey studies, social network analysis, and psychology and neuroscience experiments with members of extremist organisations and conspiricist movements including jihadists, white nationalists, QAnon, and others. Dr. Hamid’s publications have appeared in several peer-reviewed journals and he has provided interviews, presentations and talks to various media outlets.
  • Dr Simbal Khan is the Community Stabilization Expert of the UNDP Pakistan Country Office. She is a Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding specialist and Security analyst specialized on the South-Central Asian region. In addition to her long engagement with conflict prevention, analysis, CVE, de-radicalization and security/political risk analysis in the region, she is a specialist on trans-border militant movements in the Afghanistan-Pakistan regional space. For the last ten years, her work has focused on strengthening community and societal resilience against conflict and violent extremism in Pakistan and the broader South-Central Asian region.
  • Amadou Tall is the Program Director for Chemonics’ USAID Global Reconciliation Fund People-to-People Burkina Faso program called “On Est Ensemble” and brings more than two decades of experience working in rural development in Burkina Faso. Since 2017, he has supported three USAID programs to design and implement hundreds of community-level activities aiming to address rural development challenges, stabilize communities impacted by violence and insecurity, and promote social cohesion among farmer and herder populations across Burkina Faso.