November 21, 2019: CODE PAKISTAN has published a report on countering violent extremism on campuses. The report is a product of a yearlong research CODE PAKISTAN conducted. The research involved extensive consultations with university administrations and students as well as other relevant stakeholders. The report is also based on a thorough literature review of national and international open-source information. The rising numbers of violent extremist acts involving highly educated youth led us to the idea of conducting a study primarily focused on CVE on Campuses. Not only have highly educated youth been frequently reported to have joined terrorist organizations, the footprint of extremist organizations on campuses has also been increasing of late. The role played by the ability of extremists to organize, propagate, and recruit on university campuses as well as through the use of modern online social media, thus, achieved primacy.
The legal and policy discourse with regard to extremism in Pakistan revolves around punitive measures aimed at deterring terrorist acts rather than obligating state institutions to promote tolerance for diversity and counter-extremism. It is under the blanket of this over-arching punitive anti-terrorism legal regime that extremist ideologies have penetrated the educational institutions of higher learning without detection. The state’s response has often come very late after terrorist acts were committed and has, of course, been punitive than corrective.
It is in the backdrop of these developments that the study conducted by CODE PAKISTAN attempts to answer questions about subjects such as the level of penetration of extremist ideologies in the higher education institutions of Pakistan, the reasons for the proliferation of extremist views on university campuses in the country, the international framework on engaging the youth in peacebuilding, the policy response of the Pakistani state to on-campus extremism, the level of involvement of the youth in formulation of the state’s policy response to on-campus extremism, and the impact of the state’s response to countering on-campus extremism so far, and the gaps in the state’s policy response to on-campus extremism be filled in Pakistan. Please click here to access the full report.