Hedayah, the International Centre of Excellence for Countering Violent Extremism, and United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, have co-hosted the third annual international Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Research Conference, being held in Jakarta.

The conference, which started on Tuesday, is held in Indonesia for the first time. The first two editions were held in Abu Dhabi in 2014 and 2015.

Haoliang Xu, assistant administrator and director of the regional bureau for Asia and the Pacific for the UNDP; Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General; Yenny Wahid, Director of Wahid Foundation, and Maqsoud Kruse, Executive Director of Hedayah, gave welcome speeches at the conference. Senior officials from the governments of Indonesia, Australia and Spain also made their opening remarks at the event.

The third annual conference aims to enhance a deeper understanding of Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) through regional and thematic sessions, with a focus on the drivers of radicalisation - factors that contribute to and protect against violent extremism - CVE initiatives, and lessons for policy and practice. It also aims to provide a platform for CVE researchers and network members of the annual research conference to meet and share up-to-date CVE research and analyses on an international scale.

The event will help identify good practices, insights and effective local solutions to violent extremism, and will look for ways to turn research outcome into practical policies and programme recommendations for practitioners and policymakers.

Hedayah seeks to create a model for the international CVE research conference, and a number of research institutions co-host, co-sponsor and co-organise the event every year.

This year’s conference is sponsored by the governments of Australia, Spain and Norway, Coventry University, Edith Cowan University, Australia, the Royal United Services Institute, Swansea University, UN Women and Wahid Foundation.

The conference will produce an edited volume of essays by the speakers, based on their presentations and research; a brief of all policy, research and programming recommendations coming out of the conference, demarcated by region and theme, and a P/CVE research agenda, 2017-2018 to identify and bridge the existing knowledge and research gaps to include methodological issues and potential specific research projects.