OPEN MINDS

Innovative Methodology For Preventing Radicalization To Promote Social Inclusion Of Youth

In a context of increasingly polarized societies, with extremist ideologies spreading and presenting high threats to social cohesion in Europe, the EU and its Member States are recognizing the need to develop effective prevention policies and intervention scenarios supporting social inclusion and cohesive societies.

It is especially relevant to focus on psychological and social mechanisms of alienation, radicalization and deradicalization of young people in European urban contexts. OPEN MINDS will aim to identify social-economic problems, design and pilot solutions and, refine and validate these solutions in close collaboration to stakeholders and civil society.

The project will explore the socio-economic drivers of radical religious and political ideologies prone to incite or lead to violence. It will also analyze exit strategies and disengagement from radical contexts and present complementary knowledge on non-radicalizing identity. Through the project, an extensive fieldwork will be conducted and the research findings will be translated into two intervention scenarios (gaming and training) which will directly enable young people to take an active role in a more inclusive Europe.

The consortium will draw on the existing state-of-the-art research across relevant disciplines (from conflict and terrorism studies, sociology, psychology, geography, linguistics, moral philosophy, computer science and econometrics) to pave a way for exploring the understudied links between socio-economics, radicalization and deradicalization and related socio-ecological resilience.