Preventing extremist violence through raising Integrative Complexity

When?

Monday 7 February 2011, 17:00 to 18:30

Where?

Room 04 AD 00 (AD Building)

Open to:

Public, Staff, Students

Speaker:

Dr Sara Savage

Dr Sara Savage, University of Cambridge

Being Muslim Being British is a primary prevention initiative that raises participants’ levels of integrative complexity (IC) as a means of preventing violent extremism and promoting social cohesion. The approach is based on changing ‘us-vs.-them’ perceptions of social reality by improving the quality of people’s information processing – achieving high Integrative Complexity (Suedfeld 2003), particularly in the domain of values, and is reputedly one of the first prevention programmes with empirically measurable outcomes benchmarked against extremist violence. Assessment research based on seven pilot courses around the UK (each course comprising 82 hour modules) shows that IC rises significantly by the end of the course, in comparison with IC levels before the course, and that high IC significantly correlates with participants’ choosing of pro-social activism rather than violent mobilisation. New IC interventions are underway for right wing extremism and religious leaders of a range of faiths.