ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a curious and conspicuous lack of gender-sensitive metrics and indicators in the new fi eld of development assistance aimed at countering violent extremism (CVE). This absence is striking in the increasingly data-driven development world, where policies of the leading development agencies, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID), often prefer the use of indicator-dependent quantitative and experimental methods to measure change and identify the impact of their interventions. Speculating that the lack of data in this area might stem from gaps in the evidence undergirding the programs, this chapter briefl y considers the concept of “violent extremism”2 and the status of knowledge linking this phenomenon to terrorism, and examines the approach to gender embodied in USAID’s CVE programming. Finding that CVE programming is implicitly gendered but overtly gender-blind, the chapter then sets out a series of tools that USAID and other development agencies could use to analyze the gendered impacts of its work in this emerging area. In conclusion, this chapter suggests that the absence of gendered data is a product of the nascent evidentiary base on which CVE programming is built and a symptom of the implicit but myopic gender theory on which it depends.
