Resilience pathways against poverty and extremism : framing public issues within state policy and community action

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to highlight that the consequences of poverty and inequality, which are not only represented in terms of wealth, but relates to equal opportunity and access to primary public services such as education, health, and employment. These are crucial public issues and sustainable development goals which requires government policy reforms and an approach from the community to incorporate collective action. As a result of academic literature and research reviews, this paper argues that when sectors of society are excluded and disengaged from access to education, health services and employment, or deprived of opportunity of future prosperity, they may use extremist violence or terrorism to vent the political frustrations in current policy and their feelings of social discontentment. The emergence of extremist violence and terrorism as structural social violence in a society may be present due to poor policy and a lack of social cohesion. Effective policies and resilience programs are most successful when the community can take ownership of the policy reforms on the public issues directly affecting their community, and this inadvertently can achieve even broader global outcomes. However, this also requires good governance which introduces policies that provide violence reduction initiatives through employment, vocational and education programs, in conjunction with poverty and inequality alleviation in the most vulnerable communities. It is hypothesised that having proactive policy reforms can cultivate individuals and entire communities into a culture of resilience which encourages collective community action as a pathway out of poverty, inequality, extremist violence and terrorism. However, this requires government funding into sustainable development programs, initiatives and the political will for policy reforms.