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Atelier de praticiens, fermé au public. "Measuring Radicalization Workshop" - Since 2000, the number of terrorist attacks worldwide has increased dramatically, with a sharp acceleration starting in 2011. The attacks have also become increasingly concentrated. In 2014, 57 per cent of all attacks occurred in just five countries: Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Syria (Global Terrorism Index 2015). These attacks have had devastating effects not just on the lives of the victims and their families, but on the rest of the country and the region, as investment and tourism decline and economies fall into a low-growth trap. When radicalized groups’  ideologies  turn  into  violence  and  full-fledged  civil  wars,  the  humanitarian consequences are heavy and the developmental impact long-lasting. Bringing an end to civil wars and countering violent extremism are the highest priority for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.While  much  of  the  governments’  effort  involves  the  security  sector,  the  need  for  a  better understanding of the drivers of radicalization is key to better-tailored policies in all sectors.Recent findings suggest that economic and social policies help preventing the spread of violent extremism (World Bank 2016). Development organizations have a key role to play in this field.They can support countries in making policies, and they also have a direct power to counter violent  extremism  through  long-term  targeted  interventions  in  sectors  such  as  education, employment,  social  protection,  and  more  generally  by  fostering  inclusion.  This  means  that countering  radicalization  measures  can  be  transversally  implemented  in  most  development operations in MENA.However, the limited data available now hampers the quality of the analysis, and the relevance of the results. Recent efforts to include violence-specific modules in surveys around the world can be replicated to address the issue of radicalization. This workshop aims to bring together experts form different fields and regions to address two important challenges: (i) refining our definition of radicalization, and (ii) addressing the current issues of measurement in the existent surveys.Scholars  and  policymakers  have  not  produced  a  dominant  and  unified  definition  of Radicalization.  There  is  some  ambivalence  regarding  the  link  between  violence  and radicalization. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for example defines Radicalization  as  the  act  of  “advocating,  engaging  in,  preparing  or  otherwise  supporting ideologically  motivated  or  justified  violence  to  further  social,  economic  and  political objectives” (USAID 2011), hence allowing radicalization to comprise both the expression of extreme  views  and  the  actual  exercise  of  violence.  For  others,  such  as  sociologist  Farhad Khosrokhavar, radicalization is “the process by which an individual or a group adopts a violent form  of action, directly  linked to  an extremist  ideology with  a political,  social or religious content dissenting against the established order on a political, social, or cultural side.” That is, radicalization entails or supports the use of violence.The  relationship  between  radicalization  and  terrorism  also  requires  consideration.  Suicide attacks in recent history (e.g., Sri Lanka in the late 1980s) and the 9/11 attacks, have led many to  closely  associate  radicalization  with  terrorism.  The  U.K.  Department  for  International Development (DFID) equates radicalization with terrorism by defining the former as “the use of and facilitation of violence targeted on civilians as a means of rectifying grievances, real or perceived, which form the basis of increasingly strong exclusive group identities” (DFID 2013).Of course, the definition of terrorism is also contested, with differences in views regarding whether terrorism should be understood as violence committed by non-state actors, or the act of violence against unarmed civilians.The  drivers  of  radicalization  also  require  further  research,  which  is  currently  hampered  by difficulties  in  establishing  valid  measurement  tools.  The  extant  literature  emphasizes individual-level factors, often through studies of former terrorists or nationally representative surveys. These studies find that extremists are “want-mores” rather than “have-nots” (Lerner 1958, 368) and that extremism is linked to frustration, anger, and powerlessness (Krueger and Maleckova 2003; Horgan 2009). These findings hold in the MENA region where Bhatia and Ghanem  (2016)  show,  using  opinion  polls  for  a  sample  of  eight  Arab  countries,  that unemployment among the educated leads to a greater probability to hold radical ideas.Yet, these approaches have serious limitations. Research based on interviews with a group of former terrorists or small surveys based on convenience samples of  radicalized individuals suffers  from  selection  bias  and  lacks  a  comparable  group  of  non-radicalized  subjects, prohibiting identification of possible drivers of radicalization. Studies based on opinion polls face the issue of measurement: the high non-response rate is indicative of the social desirability bias, while some questions used now are just too difficult to interpret accurately. For instance, the question “are you willing to die for your religion” has a high positive response in the MENA region,  yet  using  it  as  a  proxy  for  radicalization  of  propensity  to  use  violence  is  hardly defensible.  Much work remains to be done to develop adequate methods and measurements of radicalization.Cet atelier se déroule à huis clos et est conjointement organsié par la Banque mondiale, le Center for Mediterranean Integration (CMI) et le Program on governance and Local Development.Aucun inscription possible.&#160;&#160;