*The following article provides a summary of a chapter contributed to Extremisms in Africa Vol 3 co-authored by myself, Fatma Ahmed, and Jem Thomas entitled Using evidence-based research to directly improve P/CVE programming: A Case Study of a Social Network Analysis in Somalia.
Across the community of practitioners, policymakers, researchers and academics involved in Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE), laments are often heard of a paucity of deep research in the discipline. There are claims that projects are too often based upon a weak solid-evidence base, that researchers are too removed from practitioners (and vice versa), and that research is often unrelated to realities on the ground. Thus we decided, within the confines of an existing project in Somalia, to examine the benefits of deep primary research, and how such might go some way to tackling these issues.
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