A/HRC/43/46 deprivation can be felt at all levels of society, creating a disconnect between the hopes and realities of those in a society, 44 or an emphasis on education, despite evidence that both educated and non-educated young people are potentially vulnerable to violent extremism and that it is the broad societal environment that creates vulnerability to radicalization. 45 Similarly, despite recent research indicating that it remains an unproven assumption that messages, myths, promises, objectives, glamour and other enticements propagated through violent extremism can be replaced with, or dismantled by, an alternative set of communications,46 many national and international measures to prevent and counter violent extremism are focused on counter-narratives. The Special Rapporteur underscores that there is no robust data showing that that approach works, 47 absent a meaningful commitment to and the delivery of transformed material conditions on the ground. Without that, counternarratives are little more than exaggerations and are perceptively recognized as such by their target communities. Problematically, the counter-narrative approach is also being pushed by the United Nations, through its comprehensive international framework to counter terrorist narratives, Security Council resolution 2354 (2017) and the Secretary-General’s Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, in which Member States are called upon to develop and implement national communications strategies, in close cooperation with social media companies and the private sector, to challenge narratives associated with violent extremism. 48 The Special Rapporteur is concerned that that approach may be counterproductive, given that it can both appear as a defence of the status quo 49 and contribute to a loss of trust in civil society and in government, in particular where opacity with regard to the genuine nature of the countering voices is tolerated. Similarly, while there is limited and contested evidence on the connection between communication and extremism, including the link between consuming online extremist content and offline violent activity, 50 many measures to prevent and counter violent extremism have ploughed definitively into content regulation, which is directly translated in multiple national contexts into broad, indiscriminate and overreaching limitations on freedom of expression. IV. Trends in the prevention and countering of violent extremism 23. The Special Rapporteur recognizes the existence of a broad range of programmes and entrenched and emerging legal and policy measures to prevent and counter violent extremism. They include programmes and plans of actions at the national, regional and local levels, which are developed by Governments, civil society and international organizations, and capacity-building programmes and technical assistance across a range of sectors, such as drivers of extremism, youth, education, the reintegration of disengaged fighters and returnees, the media, de-radicalization programmes in prisons, as well as gender-specific engagement, in particular with women. Measures to prevent and counter violent extremism involve schools, health services, prisons, local communities, religious centres and leaders and law enforcement. The Special Rapporteur highlights some of the main worrying trends across the sector, each of which would benefit from considered and in-depth human rightscentred analysis and assessment. 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 UNDP, “Root causes of radicalization”. Ibid. UNDP, “Report on Oslo II”, p. 18. Eric Rosand and Emily Winterbotham, “Do counter-narratives actually reduce violent extremism?”, 20 March 2019, Brookings, Order from Chaos blog. Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force working group on the use of the Internet for terrorist purposes, “Summary, follow-up and recommendations adopted at the Riyadh conference on the use of the Internet to counter the appeal of extremist violence”, 2011. UNDP, “Report on Oslo II”, p. 23. Ibid. 9