Understanding the roots of Kurdish resilience to violent extremism in Iraq
Channel: Norsk utenrikspolitisk institutt NUPI
Date: 2023-04-27

What are the reasons behind the limited impact of violent extremism and the Islamic State in the Kurdistan region of Iraq? 

In this episode of the NUPI podcast The World Stage, Dlawer Ala’Aldeen, Juline Beaujouan and Morten Bøås are standing at the top of the citadel of Erbil in the Kurdistan region of Iraq to discuss this topic. 

Dlawer Ala’Aldeen is the Founding President of the Middle East Research Institute. Formerly, he served as Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research in the Kurdistan Regional Government and as Professor of Medicine at Nottingham University in the UK. He has long been engaged in Iraq's capacity and nation building projects and has published extensively on political and security dynamics, governance systems and democratisation in the Middle East.

Juline Beaujouan is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, a senior research fellow at the Open Think Tank in Dohuk, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and also a member of the PAVE research team in Iraq, a sister project of PREVEX that was funded over the same Horizon 2020 call as PREVEX. 

Morten Bøås is a Research Professor at NUPI, and the principal investigator of the PREVEX project, a project funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 program. The project aims to understand both drivers of violent extremism and how local communities respond and resist through various ways of expressing resilience. 

This podcast is part of the PREVEX project. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870724. Read more about the project and findings here: https://www.prevex-balkan-mena.eu/