This Jordan country report on drivers of extremism at the micro level completes earlier research conducted by Generations For Peace (GFP) on national approaches to extremism in Jordan (Mhadeen, Bint Feisal and Štikovac Clark, 2020), national frameworks for countering violent extremism (CVE) at the macro-level (Mhadeen, Bint Feisal and Štikovac Clark, 2021), and the three case studies that examined meso-level drivers of violent extremism (VE) and the related contexts of socialisation (Mhadeen, Bint Feisal and Štikovac Clark, 2022), conducted as part of the EU Horizon 2020 CONNEKT project.
The report provides the necessary quantitative evidence to guide researchers, policy makers, and prevention of violent extremism (PVE) stakeholders on potential programming and entry point interventions in Jordan through the analysis of seven drivers of VE examined within the CONNEKT project. These are religion, economic deprivation, territorial inequalities, digital socialisation, political issues, educational, leisure and cultural opportunities, and transnational dynamics.
The findings bridge three knowledge gaps. First, the findings offer qualitative insights into how drivers of VE are experienced by individual youth in their daily lives. Second, as 27% of the research sample is the rarely accessed age group of youth between 15-18 years old, the findings enable a better understanding of how these drivers are being experienced in late childhood years. Third, due to relatively large respondent sample this research was based on, the findings presented in this report provide qualitative data value in most cases not found in VE-related research in Jordan. Most research on VE in Jordan is conducted through small scale qualitative studies, except for two studies that addressed profiling of convicted Jordanian extremists but which excluded the 15-18 age group (Abu Rumman and Shteiwi, 2018; Abu Rumman, Gouda and Bondokji, 2022).
Within the premises of CONNEKT project, the findings in this report will be comparable to those in three MENA countries (Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt), and with four Western Balkans countries, therefore offering regional and international PVE stakeholders, as well as the EU, comparable quantitative measures to guide regional prevention-focused efforts.
Although the analysis is based on a methodology that was designed to collect data on the individual level, the findings establish the prominence of meso-level dynamics on both VE drivers and PVE efforts, whereby community public and NGO activities can influence youth and their peer networks, and where crucial factors such as relative deprivation (Heather et al., 2012) are experienced at the level of the family unit and not only by individuals.
Another important limitation is that the data collected, by design, does not allow establishing strong correlations between different drivers. Five crosstabulations are used to explain results, but correlations are discussed based on the qualitative results of previous reports published by CONNEKT.
