ABSTRACT
Terrorist rehabilitation and community engagement are vital tools used in Southeast Asia for decades to manage ideological, ethnopolitical and politico-religious threats. However, the region faced an unprecedented threat with the rise of al Qaeda centric and Islamic State centric threat groups in 2001 and 2014 respectively. The region was well placed to engage structured threat groups such as al Qaeda and their associated groups like Jemmah Islamiyah and Kumpulan Militan Malaysia as they had definitive ideological templates. With the disruption and destruction of structured groups, their followers and individuals with no group affiliation are turning to IS content on the Internet as their principal source of ideology. Rehabilitating IS terrorists and extremists who constitute their own ideology from propaganda on the Internet is complex. Transforming IS followers involves bringing in a range of experts – clerics, teachers, social workers, artists, vocational instructors and others to engage the beneficiary and his or her family. With the expansion of IS into the region and likely future unity moves between IS and al Qaeda, the region’s preventing exclusivism and countering extremism strategy should be to broaden existing rehabilitation and community engagement programs. More than ever before, governments will need to work with a range of partners – community organizations, civil society organizations and academia – to fight the current and emerging wave of terrorism, extremism, exclusivism both in the online and offline spaces. Although the intelligence driven countering the operational threat should continue, preventing exclusivism and countering extremism in Southeast Asia are the game changers in combating terrorism.
