RAN Y&E WG Meeting - Dealing with anti-system/anti-government attitudes and extremism among young people, Bucharest 29 February-1 March 2024

In recent years, the landscape of radical or extremist ideologies has become increasingly fluid and dynamic. Simultaneously, the trust of young people in democracy is decreasing, despite the efforts for citizenship education. People with various divergent grievances and ideologies seem to have found each other in a narrative that largely evolves around distrust in governments and institutions. In P/CVE terms, this narrative refers to anti-system and anti-government extremism (ASAGE). It is important to note that ASAGE goes beyond common criticism by youth towards authority, but is a specific narrative undermining principles of democracy and promoting structural distrust towards the Institutions.

On 29 February and 1 March 2024, the RAN Youth & Education working group convened a meeting to discuss how youth practitioners experience this specific narrative in their daily work. Moreover, we have discussed the reasons why young people have developed such distrust in authorities, and what youth professionals should do in order to re-engage these youngsters and have them resist violent means of voicing their opinions. Some of the main outcomes of this meeting were the following:

• Participants stated that it is too easy to blame young people for their disappointment or anger towards the system and government. In many occasions, systems and governments have not worked for young people and have let them down. Therefore, self-criticism and consideration of young people in policies is needed within governments and institutions.
• The participants identified different groups of young people with characteristics that can put them at risk of ASAGE narratives. Based on this categorisation, participants designed strategies or approaches to deal with the breeding ground and other contextual factors that can foster ASAGE attitudes.
• The participants have listed overarching strategies they consider crucial when re-engaging young people with strong anti-system and anti-government sentiments.

In this paper, we will first discuss how practitioners experience and observe ASAGE among the young people they work with. Then, we give an overview of general and circumstance-specific elements that construct the breeding ground for ASAGE. Before the group drafted new strategies and approaches, the evidence-based principles of ‘what we know works’ were listed. Both the diagnosis of the challenge and the lessons learned allowed the participants to design specific approaches or strategies for four different groups of youngsters at risk of ASAGE.