Practices in Multiagency Collaboration against Violent Extremism at the City Level: Nordic Approaches

In the Nordic countries, prevention of radicalization and violent extremism is based on an existing crime prevention collaboration. The core tenet of crime prevention approaches is that early radicalization prevention is best organized as a joint effort, where individual cases are assessed holistically and relevant information shared. This presentation is based on Nordic comparative research that provides a critical analysis of policies, perceptions, and practices regarding multiagency approaches. At the city level, we systematically explore how core components of a Nordic governance model contribute to and might be preconditions for effective multiagency collaboration and secure societies. Variations in these city-level approaches lead to an important question: do these various multiagency approaches to countering violent extremisms and radicalization constitute a unified model? The project provides an informed platform for spreading Nordic experiences and models of governance to other countries in the area of radicalization prevention and countering violent extremism. The multiagency collaboration in Nordic cities tends to be composed of a smaller number of professionals, e.g., three to eight, representing social and health services, a coordinator, and the police. Their positions vary; some represent leadership in the municipality, others are positioned at more mid-level management, and others are frontline professionals handling clients on a daily basis. The origin of these collaborative efforts is based on the School, Social and health services, and Police framework (SSP) in Denmark, Norway, and the Ankkuri group in Finland. We assert that future efforts can also be more need-based, comprising municipal/local initiatives with an element of the guiding national policies, and include the legal frameworks to guide professionals on ethical issues like confidentiality. This presentation is part of a larger project entitled “Nordic Multiagency Approaches to Handling Extremism: Policies, Perceptions, and Practices”, led by professor and center director Tore Bjorgo (University of Oslo) and is funded by NordForsk (Nordic Council of Minister), 2018–2021.