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Once a Jihadist, Always a Jihadist? A Deradicalization Program Seen from the Inside

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France has traditionally taken a security-based approach to the fight against terror. It was a latecomer to the field of radicalization prevention and the establishment of disengagement programs aimed at jihadists. It only started to think seriously about the issue in 2013 and its first attempts involved certain irregularities.

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For that reason, deradicalization suffers from a persistent bad reputation in France. The disengagement and reintegration programs established since 2016—RIVE from 2016 until 2018 and PAIRS, which started in 2018 and is still running—have operated behind closed doors. Discreetness was preferred to overcommunication. This study—the result of a long-term field survey of the staff, participants, and partners of PAIRS—opens the black box of disengagement methods. It offers a nuanced assessment of these initiatives, which, after four years of operations, have produced reassuring results: among the dozens of terrorist offenders who have participated in RIVE and PAIRS in open custody, none have reoffended.

This publication is also available in French: "Djihadistes un jour, djihadistes toujours ? Un programme de déradicalisation vu de l'intérieur"

 

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ISBN / ISSN

979-10-373-0291-5

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Once a Jihadist, Always a Jihadist? A Deradicalization Program Seen from the Inside

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Author(s)
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Marc HECKER

Intitulé du poste

Deputy Director of Ifri, Editor-in-Chief of Politique étrangère, and Research Fellow at the Security Studies Center, Ifri

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 A soldier watching a sunset on an armored infantry fighting vehicle
Security Studies Center
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Heir to a tradition dating back to the founding of Ifri, the Security Studies Center provides public and private decision-makers as well as the general public with the keys to understanding power relations and contemporary modes of conflict as well as those to come. Through its positioning at the juncture of politics and operations, the credibility of its civil-military team and the wide distribution of its publications in French and English, the Center for Security Studies constitutes in the French landscape of think tanks a unique center of research and influence on the national and international defense debate.

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Accroche

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Date de publication
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Date de publication
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Date de publication
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Accroche

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Once a Jihadist, Always a Jihadist? A Deradicalization Program Seen from the Inside