A Brief on Policy and Practice to Inform National Strategies for Preventing Violent Extremism and Promoting Sustainable Peace.

Women peace practitioners and rights activists have long been concerned by decisions made at global and national levels that at the local level impact dynamics of economic exclusion, threaten social cohesion and exacerbate vulnerabilities to radicalization. Violent extremism and state responses to it place significant economic burden on societies. The members of the Women’s Alliance for Security Leadership (WASL) have consistently drawn attention to this gap between policy intentions and realities on the ground. Their lived experiences of the economic dynamics in contexts affected by violent extremism, combined with desk research on the state of current policy and practice, and the multistakeholder Global Solutions Exchange (GSX)2 meeting on these issues held at the UNDP headquarters in New York in March 2017, inform the findings of this report.