Half of Extremism Prevention Practitioners Do Not Measure Intervention Impact Systematically

Only approximately half of practitioners delivering tertiary extremism prevention programmes in Europe and North America evaluate participant progress using standardised tools or predefined criteria, according to an empirical investigation published in Frontiers in Psychiatry. Conducted by researcher Heidi Maiberg from the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu, the qualitative study investigates why measuring the tangible impact of deradicalisation and disengagement initiatives remains an acute operational struggle across Western jurisdictions. While tertiary interventions designed to support individuals disengaging from violent extremist movements have proliferated at national and municipal levels, rigorous evidence establishing which programmatic components work remains scarce. Drawing upon in-depth semi-structured interviews with twelve frontline intervention providers operating across Finland, Sweden, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, the study examines how practitioners conceptualise programme success and failure. The findings demonstrate that a persistent lack of standardized terminology, inconsistent working methodologies, and unaligned practitioner training severely hinder systematic evaluation throughout the international security sector.

Tertiary prevention encompasses targeted interventions aimed at individuals who have already radicalised or actively engaged in violent extremism, supporting their pathways toward deradicalisation, disengagement, rehabilitation, and social reintegration. Although the term deradicalisation programme is frequently applied as an umbrella label across municipal and correctional environments, existing literature distinguishes between cognitive deradicalisation—characterised by profound attitudinal transformation and ideological rejection of violence—and disengagement, which denotes behavioral cessation of extremist involvement without requiring fundamental shifts in personal belief. To capture contemporary field dynamics, Maiberg conducted twenty comprehensive qualitative interviews as part of her doctoral research, focusing the analytical dataset on twelve active intervention providers after confirming data saturation while excluding non-practitioner formers. The recruited cohort comprised nine European and three North American practitioners predominantly affiliated with third-sector non-governmental organisations funded through project-based public allocations or voluntary contributions. By applying reflexive thematic analysis alongside grounded theory principles, the investigation captured nuanced operational narratives from practitioners working directly with far-right extremists and violent Islamist movements.

The investigation reveals profound disagreements regarding how intervention providers define and operationalise the fundamental concept of success within their daily casework. For several interviewed practitioners, the mere act of an individual initiating contact and remaining engaged within a voluntary programme is perceived as an inherent success, an intuitive metric grounded in the recognition that self-motivation represents a critical turning point. Other exit workers articulated considerably more stringent criteria, maintaining that genuine success necessitates measurable behavioural modification, independent life management, stable psychosocial coping, and the unequivocal abandonment of extremist reasoning. However, consensus collapses on the necessity of ideological transformation. While certain providers insist that durable success requires dismantling hateful doctrines, others argue that clients often require basic social companionship and life stabilisation without necessarily altering their ideological convictions. Acknowledging two competing academic schools of thought—one viewing behavioural desistance as sufficient and another demanding cognitive distancing—Maiberg contends that achieving disengagement without deradicalisation should be termed progress rather than success.

Conceptualisations of operational failure exhibit equally striking divergence across the interviewed cohort, exposing a lack of standardised institutional benchmarks for tracking adverse intervention outcomes. Four of the interviewed exit workers conceptualised failure as an inevitable occupational reality in highly volatile casework, defining it through client re-engagement, persistence in extremist milieus, or the active execution of extremist goals. Such divergent perspectives illustrate how practitioners frequently rationalise adverse occurrences through professional tenure and unstandardised benchmarks, demonstrating that without unified criteria for defining unsuccessful outcomes, tertiary prevention programmes cannot reliably isolate systematic weaknesses or prevent well-intentioned interventions from generating unintended harm.

In categorising the diverse intervention methods deployed across organisations, the study identifies social work and informal mentoring as primary pillars of tertiary casework. Contemporary intervention frameworks prioritise holistic life support, multi-agency collaboration, and tailor-made case management designed around an individual unique vulnerabilities, threat profiles, and capabilities. Within this category, mentoring functions not as an authoritative hierarchical relationship, but as an egalitarian partnership where practitioners and clients collaborate on equal footing. Providers frequently undertake practical life-stabilisation tasks that normally fall to personal social circles, such as assisting with municipal paperwork, visiting employment bureaus, or aiding domestic relocations. Closely allied with formal mentoring is the practice of hanging out, which involves unstructured joint leisure activities, including bowling or attending public demonstrations, intended to cultivate relational trust. Practitioners noted that the ultimate objective of intensive relationship-building is paradoxically obsolescence, where the client establishes sufficient prosocial connections, stable employment, and domestic independence to no longer require contact with intervention staff.

Direct dialogue forms another fundamental technique within social work practices, yet practitioners in Europe and North America encounter pronounced friction when navigating ideological and theological discussions. Whereas state-sponsored programmes in several Muslim-majority jurisdictions in the Global South systematically incorporate clerical dialogues focused on theological reconciliation and religious moderation, Western practitioners largely operate within secular legal traditions that fiercely protect individual liberties. Interviewed exit workers acknowledged experiencing considerable role ambiguity when addressing extremist belief systems, frequently fearing that challenging personal ideologies would infringe upon legal guarantees of freedom of religion and thought. Consequently, secular case workers predominantly avoid formal theological disputation, concentrating their efforts instead on fostering non-violent behavioural habits and delegating doctrinal engagement to external religious authorities within broader multi-agency arrangements. Maiberg highlights this dynamic as a structural paradox: although programmes are publicly branded as deradicalisation initiatives, their day-to-day operations heavily prioritise behavioural disengagement over direct ideological deconstruction.

Interdisciplinary methods incorporating structured mental health interventions represent a second major operational category mapped across the participating organisations. Practitioners frequently utilise exit talk, an adapted motivational interviewing technique that prioritises past criminal offences not as moral indictments, but as structured communicative baselines to foster personal accountability and behavioural change. The research underscores that a vast majority of clients entering tertiary programmes present complex psychosocial distress, including historical childhood trauma, exposure to domestic violence, severe school bullying, clinical depression, and acute burnout resulting from violent extremist lifestyles. Rather than presuming direct causal links between psychopathology and terrorist conduct, intervention providers navigate diverse mental health presentations through two primary pathways. Well-resourced organisations either refer participants to specialised external psychiatric professionals through multi-agency coordination or deliver internal therapeutic modalities directly. These internal interventions encompass individual trauma processing, dedicated family therapy sessions aimed at mapping dysfunctional relational dynamics, and specialised group therapy for parents whose children became foreign terrorist fighters.

The study documents several controversial, unstandardised techniques deployed exclusively by practitioners who are former extremists themselves, illustrating significant variations in field methodology. One former far-right activist reported taking neo-Nazi and skinhead clients directly to synagogues that the individuals had previously targeted or attacked, attempting an improvised form of restorative justice intended to provoke interpersonal empathy and formal apologies. However, this high-risk practice operates entirely without formal clinical protocols, psychological readiness assessments, or protective guidelines to mitigate potential re-traumatisation for victimised congregations. Another former practitioner utilised commercial DNA ancestry testing kits with white supremacist clients, attempting to induce cognitive dissonance and ideological opening by demonstrating multiracial genetic lineages comprising Jewish or African ancestry. While former extremists often establish rapid rapport and perceived credibility with radicalised individuals, scholarly assessments caution that personal lived experience cannot replace professional qualifications, underscoring the urgent necessity of clinical supervision and pedagogical training for former extremists operating in practitioner roles.

The investigation reveals a distinct structural divide between intervention providers who systematically track case progression and those who abstain from empirical impact assessment. Practitioners who routinely utilise standardised assessment tools generally belong to established organisations operating for five or more years, maintaining multi-agency governmental partnerships, diversified funding streams, and interdisciplinary staffs combining professional social workers with former extremists. These mature entities actively embed evidence-based assessment protocols into continuous casework routines and demonstrate organisational capacity to absorb administrative costs. In sharp contrast, the approximately fifty percent of providers who do not measure intervention impact are concentrated within small, nascent, or volunteer-driven organisations. These practitioners frequently operate in regional contexts lacking public sector evaluation mandates, face prohibitive financial barriers to acquiring proprietary assessment instruments, and lack access to academic repositories. Moreover, independent former extremists within these fledgling organisations heavily rely on intuitive gut feeling rather than standardised diagnostic tools, treating client engagement through informal experiential instincts.

To overcome systemic evaluation deficiencies, the study urges international policymakers, academic researchers, and operational agencies to establish standardized soft law frameworks across the prevention architecture. Maiberg advocates for authoritative guidance documents, white papers, and standardized competencies issued through bodies such as the European Commission, the European Union Knowledge Hub, the Council of Europe, and the United Nations. Such frameworks should formally define core terminological baselines, establish valid metrics distinguishing cognitive deradicalisation from behavioural disengagement, and guide the tailored application of trauma-informed methodologies. The author also acknowledges notable methodological limitations, including the geographical dispersion across European and North American contexts and potential selection bias stemming from voluntary, uncompensated snowball sampling that favoured well-connected practitioners. Given that tertiary prevention initiatives carry substantial implications for public safety and absorb extensive public funding, transitioning the sector from intuitive practitioner lore to transparent, scientifically validated impact measurement remains an urgent prerequisite for international security policy.

Subject of Research: Evaluation practices and intervention methods in European and North American tertiary extremism prevention

Article Title: Why do we not have successful deradicalisation programmes? Impact measuring struggles in European and North American programme interventions

Article References: Maiberg, H. (2026). Why do we not have successful deradicalisation programmes? Impact measuring struggles in European and North American programme interventions. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 17, Article 1915471. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1915471

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1915471

Keywords: tertiary prevention, deradicalisation, disengagement, impact assessment, standardised evaluation tools, extremism intervention, former extremists, mentoring methods, exit talk, mental health support, trauma-informed approaches, restorative justice, DNA testing, multi-agency approach, European P/CVE, countering violent extremism, recidivism prevention, soft law standards