A new assessment from the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), published in April 2026, asks a question that has been quietly circulating in our field for years: after two decades and tens of billions of dollars, has the international Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) enterprise actually prevented or countered very much?
The authors, Marc Sommers and Mai Ibrahim Nasrallah, reviewed hundreds of programmes and convened two advisory groups of senior counter-terrorism and prevention specialists. Their conclusion is sobering. The field, they write, “rests on uncertain ground.” Programs are built on unproven assumptions. Evaluations rarely meet basic methodological standards. Most of the effort has been spent in fragile, conflict-affected states where violent extremist organizations (VEOs) are already entrenched — and where the soft-power tools of P/CVE have been outmatched by the local embeddedness of the groups they were built to confront.
LYNC does not work in those theatres. Our cross-cultural religious literacy (CCRL) programming is not a CVE intervention. We are not engaging groups that already hold territory. But the prevention side of the report’s analysis — the upstream question of how societies can be shaped to be more resilient to extremism in the first place — speaks directly to where we do work: in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and other contexts where governments are actively pursuing prevention. And here, the report’s findings deserve careful attention, because they describe a trap that the prevention agenda in our region is already at risk of walking into.
Where prevention narrows into restriction
In some Central Asian countries, prevention has come to mean something quite specific and quite narrow: expanding lists of banned online content, broadening the legal definition of extremism, and prosecuting people for storing, sharing, or even liking religious material online. Sermons and devotional recitations sit on extremism blacklists. Cases are brought without evidence of intent to incite or commit violence. International human rights bodies have repeatedly warned that definitions of extremism in the region are so broad that ordinary peaceful religious expression is being swept up in them.
This is, in the language of the ICCT report, prevention concentrated almost entirely on government restriction. It is also, by every available measure in the report, the kind of approach least likely to deliver what it promises.
Where prevention goes wrong
The ICCT authors are blunt about this. Counter-messaging and content-suppression efforts — which is essentially what an expanding blacklist amounts to — have “sparse yet discouraging evidence” behind them. The assumption underlying these programs — that exposure to “extremist” religious content causes terrorism — has, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in research, never been empirically established. The vast majority of people who hold conservative or unconventional religious views never engage in violence.
The report identifies several gaps that are particularly relevant for our region:
Prevention efforts almost always operate with the consent of governments whose own practices — restriction, surveillance, marginalization of minority communities — can themselves generate the grievances that VEOs exploit. The report puts this plainly: “In order to counter or prevent violent extremism, P/CVE actors often have to align themselves with the main contributors to the conditions that can lead to violent extremism.” When prevention becomes synonymous with state control over religious expression, the line between protecting society and policing belief disappears.
The report notes that the field equates “youth” with young men, treats them as deviance risks rather than truth-seekers, and consistently fails to engage them on the terms that actually shape their lives — including religious identity and the search for purpose.
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The whole-of-society gap.
International policy — from the UN Summit of the Future to the OSCE’s guidance for Central Asia — increasingly insists that effective prevention requires government, civil society, religious leaders, educators and communities working together. The report observes that this is the right instinct, but that the field has produced almost no practical methodology for how to actually do it in religiously plural and politically contested settings. The slogans are everywhere. The tools are not. As a result, “whole-of-society” too often collapses back into its opposite: governments enlisting teachers, clergy and community leaders as informants in a security architecture, eroding the very trust that genuine whole-of-society prevention requires.
Of seventy-four P/CVE program evaluations reviewed in one major study, only thirty-two percent could credibly claim success — and most of those claims were self-assessed by the implementers. We genuinely do not know what works.
What CCRL offers that restriction cannot
This is the gap where CCRL fits. Not as a substitute for the legitimate work of states in protecting their citizens from genuine violence, but as the upstream, relational, society-shaping work that restriction alone can never accomplish.
LYNC’s approach — to know one’s own faith and what it teaches about engaging others, to understand the faith of others the way they understand themselves, and to develop the skills to engage meaningfully across difference, all within a covenantal pluralism frame — addresses several of the gaps the report identifies, in ways particularly suited to Central Asia.
It works with governments, but on different terms. When LYNC trained seventeen provincial leaders of Kazakhstan’s Committee on Religious Affairs in Almaty in December 2024 — the first accredited training of its kind for the CRA — the goal was not to help officials detect “signs of radicalisation.” It was to equip them to engage their citizens’ religious lives as something to be understood, not policed. That is a different posture toward governance, and it is the posture the report’s findings on the governance trap point toward.
It treats religious communities as partners, not threats. A blacklist approach treats religious expression as a problem to be detected and suppressed. CCRL treats religious identity as the foundation of human dignity and one of the most important resources a society has for building social cohesion. These are not compatible postures. One generates trust. The other erodes it.
It engages young people on the terms that actually matter to them. Young people across Central Asia are doing what young people everywhere do — searching for meaning, asking serious questions about their faith and their futures, and increasingly doing so online. A state that responds to this by treating their religious curiosity as a security risk is not preventing extremism; it is producing a generation that learns to associate its own faith with suspicion. CCRL offers something different: a framework within which young people can pursue those questions openly, in community with peers from other traditions, and emerge with both a stronger sense of their own faith and a real capacity to engage with others across difference.
It is the whole-of-society methodology the field has been missing. This is the most important contribution CCRL makes to the conversation the ICCT report opens. The international prevention enterprise has reached for whole-of-society language without ever building the practical infrastructure to deliver it. CCRL is that infrastructure. It trains three skills — to know one’s own faith, to know the faith of others the way they understand themselves, and to know how to cooperate across that difference — and the competencies, including evaluation, that allow those skills to be applied in real institutional settings. Together they create a common foundation across every actor in a society. Government officials learn to engage their citizens’ religious lives as something to be understood rather than policed. Religious leaders become bridges between their communities and the wider society. Educators gain a pedagogy for classrooms where students can hold their own convictions while genuinely encountering the convictions of their peers. Civil society actors gain a shared vocabulary that lets them work across religious divides without flattening difference. Young people gain the capacity to take their own religious questions seriously in the company of peers doing the same from inside other traditions. Each part of society develops its own capacity to engage religious difference well — without civil society being conscripted into the security apparatus. That is whole-of-society prevention as the report envisions it but rarely finds.
A fit for Central Asia
The countries where LYNC works in Central Asia are not contesting territory with armed groups. They are doing prevention. The question is what kind of prevention, and what it produces.
The ICCT report makes a strong case that prevention conceived as restriction does not work and is increasingly likely to backfire. It also makes clear that prevention requires something more sophisticated: an approach that addresses governance honestly, that takes religious identity seriously, that engages young people as participants rather than risks, that brings the whole of society together without conscripting it into surveillance, and that submits its work to honest evaluation.
That is the work CCRL is built for. It is patient work. It does not produce the immediate, superficial outputs that lend themselves to easy reporting. But it addresses the actual upstream dynamics that determine whether a society becomes more cohesive or more fractured over time.
Two decades into the international prevention enterprise, the report’s authors conclude that “an upgraded approach to the vital endeavor of preventing and countering violent extremism is required.” I agree. And in the parts of Central Asia where LYNC works — countries pursuing prevention in good faith, and at a genuine crossroads about what kind of prevention to pursue — CCRL is part of what that upgrade looks like.
We have the partners, the framework, the methodology, and the moment to prove it.
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