Roundtable
The Roles of Families and Communities in Building Resilience
From 4-5 December 2013, Hedayah and The Global Center on Cooperative Security convened twenty-three experts, practitioners, academics and government officials to a closed roundtable in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE) to explore the Roles of Families and Communities in Strengthening Community Resilience against Violent Extremism.
In order to ensure a regional perspective of various communities, meeting participants were from Afghanistan, Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.
In particular, the speakers and participants discussed the ways in which families and communities have been involved in peace-building and conflict mitigation efforts, shared insights and lessons learned from these experiences in preventing and responding to violence, and made recommendations on how these might be applied to CVE programming.
The meeting built upon the work of two previously held meetings. The first, titled Strengthening community resilience against violent extremism in South Asia: What role for women and civil society?, was hosted in Singapore from 5-6 September by The Global Center and the Institute for South Asian Studies (ISAS).
The second meeting was the expert-level meeting on the “Role of Education in CVE,” hosted by CGCC and Hedayah on 17-18 September in New York. The outcomes of these two meetings helped to drive the agenda and speakers for the third event on Families and Communities in Abu Dhabi.