8 - 9 February 2024
The GCTF Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism (REMVE) workshop brought together a multitude of stakeholders from national security and law enforcement entities, private sector partners, non-government, and academic leaders, as well as community-based organizations to share unique, practical, and local community-level perspectives to further enhance the GCTF REMVE Toolkit.
The panel sessions and interactive table-top exercises included key elements of the REMVE Toolkit to help address relevant challenges and responses. The Toolkit aims to support practitioners and policymakers in the development of policies, programs, and action plans to address the rapidly evolving REMVE threats conducive to terrorism at the international, national, regional, and local levels. The workshop built upon key takeaways of various engagements, including the launch event and virtual workshop held over the course of 2023.
The REMVE Toolkit is a non-binding document intended as a resource for policymakers and practitioners, civil society, and other subject matter experts and stakeholders confronting the policy, operational, and legal challenges of designing, implementing, communicating, and managing measures to prevent and respond to the threat of REMVE. The good practices and recommendations shared by the participants of the workshops, in addition to the themes identified at the launch event and the preparatory meetings, comprise the substance of the Toolkit. The recommendations highlighted in the Toolkit are based on existing GCTF Framework Documents.
Regarding terminology, GCTF Members and experts use number of different expressions to describe REMVE and interrelated threats. These include “racially or ethnically motivated terrorism,” “ideologically motivated violent extremism,” “right-wing terrorism,” “far-right terrorism,” “extreme-right terrorism,” “violent right-wing extremism,” and “white supremacist terrorism,” “terrorism on the basis of xenophobia,” and “terrorism in the name of religion or belief,” among others. At the international level, “violent incidents often underpinned by racial, ethnic, political, and ideological motivations” have been expressly outlined as aspects of “terrorist attacks on the basis of xenophobia, racism and other forms of intolerance, or in the name of religion or belief”(XRIRB). Despite differences in terminology, each of these expressions describes attacks perpetrated by individuals or groups in the name of defending against perceived threats to their racial or ethnic identity or ensuring the superiority/supremacy thereof.
