Countering violent extremism: the role of aid and development assistance programs

The recent Strategic Insights paper Security through aid by Anthony Bergin and Sarah Hately on the use of aid and development assistance to enhance security gives attention to important but currently neglected opportunities to counter violent extremism. Those opportunities can be broadly conceptualised as positive and negative: positive building of resilience and negating the potential misuses of aid. In this post, I will focus on lessons to be learned from environmental management which could be applied to negating the misuse of aid and development assistance in a security context.