RAN Study Visit to German NGO/security cooperation

Meeting topic

In the context of P/CVE, NGOs can be – and often are – active and trustworthy partners in terms of national and regional security. While this is sometimes an implicit and indirect partnership whereby NGOs in the context of rehabilitation contribute to safer societies through their work, formats for active cooperation between NGOs (and other non-security practitioner organisations) and security actors, such as police or intelligence agencies, exist as well. At the same time, such cooperation remains contested among practitioners, often due to a fear of securitisation of non-security oriented social and pedagogical work.

Germany is one of the Member States with the most diversified P/CVE structure in the entire EU, especially with regard to tertiary prevention. Depending on the system in each respective federal state, different types of cooperation or lack thereof exist. These experiences have shown that the exact modes in which these cooperation models take place are usually subject to lengthy trust building, communication, negotiation and cooperation processes between the individual practitioners and coordinators involved.

The Federal Agency for Migration and Refugees’ (BAMF) “Advice Center on Radicalisation” acts at the heart of cooperation between institutions and organisations in the context of Islamist extremism in Germany. Within this context, the Advice Center coordinates a network of state-led and NGO-led projects across Germany and is therefore the key coordinator of family support of tertiary prevention services in the country.

This study visit intends to examine the experiences of practitioners involved in different cooperation models and to collect and discuss their insights with participants from other EU contexts.

The study visit sets out to respond to the following overarching questions:

• How does the BAMF Advice Center’s coordination and referral mechanism work?
• How does the day-to-day, on the ground cooperation between NGOs, state actors and security authorities work in practice in different contexts (incl. risks, challenges and opportunities)?
• How to ensure the sustained independence and integrity of NGOs in cooperative settings?
• How to ensure that clients’ personal rights and privacy are protected in cooperative settings?
• Which processes and timeframes are necessary on the practitioner level to establish functioning cooperation?

Participants we are looking for:

We are looking for experienced practitioners from the RAN WGs Rehabilitation, POL, LOCAL, FC&S & Prisons. Participants should either have experience in working within collaborative or multi-stakeholder contexts, or be in the planning stages of a cooperative approach.

Call for participants

To find the best-suited participants, we would like to ask you to briefly respond to this survey.

Although only a limited number of participants can be accepted to this meeting, the input gathered from all applicants will be analysed and anonymised, and used to enrich the discussions and deliverables of the meeting.

Deadline

If you are interested in participating at this meeting, please respond to the survey by 3 June.

We will invite participants based on this information. Please keep in mind that we can only invite a limited number of participants to this meeting to ensure valuable exchange and interaction, so participation is not guaranteed.

If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact us: Maximilian [dot] RufViolence-prevention-network [dot] de (Maximilian Ruf) and c [dot] ozkanradaradvies [dot] nl (Ceren Özkan).