Lessons from a Realist Review of Countering Violent Extremism: Development of Refined Heuristic Guidelines for Complex Social Programmes

The previous chapter applied realist review, for the first time, to a programme aimed at countering violent extremism, and also provided a realist synthesis of existing CVE evaluation studies. The analysis demonstrated that the realist review method, developed by Pawson (2002b, 2005, 2006), is an appropriate technique for evaluating single interventions, as well as that the principles of realistic evaluation can be used to conduct a meta-analysis of existing evaluation studies. This latter is called ‘realist synthesis’ or ‘realist review’.