Albania’s Approach to Countering Violent Extremism: Implementation, Outcomes and Alignment with the EU Approaches and Framework
Donatori
Projekti
This policy paper explores the conceptual and structural challenges of developing and implementing CT and CVE policies by the Albanian government over the last two decades. The analysis focuses on the CT measures, recent shift to CVE policy, the challenges faced, their design, implementation, and monitoring, flaws and their alignment with EU policies and approach. It also focuses on the effectiveness of Albania’s objectives on preventing CT and CVE by assessing the legislative framework, actors, actions and the outcome.
The strategic approach is crucial for setting priorities, focusing energies and resources strengthen operations, ensuring that government actors and other stakeholders work on objectives that lead toward common goals and ensuring assessment mechanism that adjusts the institution’s directions in response to a changing environment.
The research shows that over the years, the Albania’s approach to CT and CVE policy formulation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation has been fragmented, inconsistent and has suffered from the lack of sufficient institutional capacities and expertise. Furthermore, the policy architecture has been poorly aligned with the EU’s policy approach and measures.
So far, policies in the field of CT and CVE have not been formulated based on a careful and in-depth evaluation of the factual situation, institutional capacities, financial resources, demands and political vulnerabilities. Similarly, the strategies have not taken in consideration the actual institutional capabilities and implementation challenges, leading therefore to patchy and inconsistent implementation.
Judicial response to terrorism and violent extremism has confronted Albanian prosecution and courts with challenges conveying the message that there is the need for improvements in the justice system to better respond to such complex cases. Additionally, in the face of potential threats, it is important to build law enforcement’s capacities that are able to prevent and tackle terrorism and VEm at the grass-root level.
While CVE currently is stated to be at the central focus of the government, it is necessary to rethink and revisit the policy approach to in order to further streamline it. Currently the implementation within the national institutional frameworks is faced with numerous limitations, stemming from the complexity of the phenomenon of violent extremism itself and the multidisciplinary nature of the policy response.