ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how local governments can promote disengagement, deradicalisation and reintegration, and local governments’ challenges and opportunities to stimulate these processes. It argues that local governments’ role in promoting disengagement, deradicalisation and reintegration processes is closely linked to their primary societal functions, which means that local governments use their ordinary functions for promoting exit and reintegration. The chapter provides a short description of the reasons why people join and then leave violent extremist groups to help grasp how local governments can influence these processes. Local governments can, by providing different types of welfare services such as financial and social support, offer the extremist new opportunities and alternatives to continuing in violent groups or movements. Welfare service and control and surveillance are two of the major functions of local governments in fostering disengagement, deradicalisation and reintegration. Local governments’ greatest challenge is that they are part of the state, which some extremist groups perceive as an enemy.
