I just spent the last 10 days having discussions about exactly this in Spain and Portugal with some of our allied agencies and partners. Like John Horgan, who is probably the premier expert on de-radicalization programs, I am skeptical about many of these programs.
They tend to have three components: a prison intervention component, a sort of counter-narrative component, and a sort of targeted intervention component for individuals who are particularly high risk. This is what the prevent strategy in the U.K. is based on.
We have challenges with regard to being able to measure the effectiveness of many of these programs. We basically have to take people's word for it. There's lots of evidence that these programs are being subverted, that they're being undermined, so ISIS has very successfully positioned the prevent program as a brainwashing and neo-colonial type program.
There's some challenge with regards to human rights, because many intelligence services, I think, make the assumptions that as you watch too many jihadi videos, you're bound to do something violent. The causal path here doesn't work because there is no one model or process of radicalization, but we do know that there are certain triangulations of factors that make individuals far more susceptible to violence.
There's one thing that we haven't done particularly well in research, and as a result in public policies, and that is that we don't have a good understanding of the triangulation of variables of individuals who are more likely to fall into either the spell of these types of narratives or engage in some sort of action.