Preventing Islamic radicalization and conflict

In this policy brief, we report on a series of studies we conducted in Mozambique on preventing Islamic radicalization and conflict. Like some countries in the Sahel, Mozambique has seen the emergence of Islamist insurgents in its resource-rich northern province of Cabo Delgado, starting in 2017. Violence in this region is ongoing, has been associated with ISIS, and has resulted to date in more than four thousand deaths, and more than 800 thousand people displaced. The immediate reaction of the Mozambican government was solely military, with little success or even backfiring because of mistargeting insurgents and losing support of local populations. This should not come as a surprise as the classical conflict literature has focused on the idea that increasing the opportunity cost of engaging in conflict is an important way to prevent it, i.e., that winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of local populations through development can be the most effective conflict-prevention strategy (Collier and Hoeffler, 2004; Miguel et al., 2004; Berman et al., 2011). We collaborated with local religious organizations in Mozambique to test ways to decrease Islamic radicalization, and in that way, reduce anti-social behaviors and violence in Cabo Delgado. We were encouraged to ally with civil society because of an initial randomized controlled trial we started pre-conflict province-wide in Cabo Delgado that showed that community mobilization through information provision by a consortium of organizations led to lower incidence of conflict in the first year of the conflict as measured by independently reported geo-referenced violent events (ACLED and GDELT; Armand et al., 2020). This way, we started believing that religious organizations (which were part of that first consortium) could have a specific role to play in terms of reaching communities with relevant information to prevent conflict. That could be a way to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the local populations while addressing the specific religious dimension of the violent conflict situation in Mozambique.