Countering Violent Extremism in Nordics: A Question of Collaboration

Multiagency collaborative structures that brings together different professional disciplines seems to be a common approach for handling extremism in the Nordic region. By combining professional expertise from schools, police, social services and other health care organizations, actions to battle extremism and radicalization can be organized and coordinated more holistically. The newly published report Mixing Logics: Multiagency Approaches for Countering Extremism summarizes the first part of the research project Nordic Multiagency Approaches to Handling Extremism: Policy, Perceptions and Practices, a three-year research project funded by Nordforsk. The Nordic research team is coordinated by C-REX. The report focuses on national and regional policies governing the multiagency work. Its explicit aim is to address: 1) the organizational structures of the Nordic collaboration models; 2) the recommended practices and how these practices are advocated by policy and 3) the possibilities and obstacles for sharing information between and within agencies.

The Nordic context: similarities and differences

Nordic countries are founded upon common values, share a strong tradition of democratic governance, and collaborate on multiple areas, including the prevention of violent extremism. Still, many differences exist in how each country approaches this issue. For instance, the use of multiagency approaches is standing on a firm, more institutionalized ground in Norway and Denmark, while this has only recently become mandatory in Finland. In Sweden, multiagency approaches are used more scarcely and with higher micro-level variance, potentially due to the lack of a central governing body. The use of existing structures and organizations, as in Denmark and Norway, is convenient and allows the utilization of established routines for assessment, reporting and following up individuals who cause concern or are regarded as being at risk of radicalization. The multiagency organizations in Denmark and Norway are in most cases dedicated to general issues and interventions in criminal or delinquent behavior, and radicalization becomes an additional area of work as part of these structures.

Organizational structures in multiagency work - a comparative analysis

Bridging the logics of societal security and social care

The theoretical point of departure in the report is a critical policy analysis combining institutional theory and discourse analysis. In this framework, multiagency collaboration structures are conceptualized as "hybrid spaces" where two different institutional logics are competing, mixing and co-existing on a daily basis. These logics are identified as a societal security logic (SSL) and a social care logic (SCL). This framework generates a new way of understanding and conceptualizing different institutional approaches to Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) and explains why multiagency collaboration may sometimes cause inter-organizational struggles. The table below summarizes our findings and is structured in accordance with Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury's (2012) foundational theoretical work on institutional logics. An institutional logic helps an individual actor to understand which type of collective he/she belongs to, what that type of collective is striving to achieve, which problems/situations to focus on, which strategies and tools that are appropriate to apply in relation to the problem/situation, and where the authority to decide what type of action that is appropriate lies.

Possibilities and obstacles for sharing information