Strong Cities Network

The Strong Cities Network is the first ever global network of mayors, policymakers and practitioners united in building social cohesion and resilience to counter violent extremism in all its forms. It was created in 2015 by the US Department of Justice and it is managed by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue of London, it was lunched in the United Nations in September 2015.
The network connects cities, towns and regions around the world to share their local best practice on an international scale and collaborate at the subnational level to prevent violent extremism and the conditions in which extremism and radicalization can take hold in communities.
The Strong Cities Network is made up of member cities in every major global region, each with specific lessons, practice or challenges surrounding violent extremism. The initiative works with mayors and local political leaders and frontline practitioners spanning multiple sectors in each member city. They also work closely with civil society groups and partner organizations in many areas.
The priority is to help cities identify where there is leading local practice, assess what factors can support good practice in a given context, and adapt and improve upon their own strategy design and implementation with a full appreciation of the specificity of one context to another.

The main objective is that based on the idea of believing that local communities are uniquely placed to counter violent extremism and create stronger and safer cities, the network serves as a platform for communities, CVE professionals and local political leaders to connect with their counterparts around the world and learn from the breadth one another’s experience.
The programming spans training, research, project implementation and capacity-building, and learning resources aimed at enriching understanding of – and enabling more effective local responses to – the challenge of violent extremism.

Seem to be sustainable as it has developed and implemented a unique intensive learning and capacity-building partnership between municipalities in Denmark and those in Jordan and Lebanon, supported by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The initiative has also launched a specific programme of work focusing on youth engagement in Jordan and Tunisia, supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The initiative is already international in scope and therefore it is not transferable in this area but if it could be transferred to other areas than violent extremism, it would be necessary to have the necessary economic support that an initiative to be characteristic needs, on all in the matter of logistics and experts, but following the same spirit of cooperation and sharing good practices in addition to the professional advice that the network provides, this initiative could be perfectly transferred to another issue such as organized crime. This would achieve a bottom-up local approach that has proved to be quite effective.

It does not seem that there is an established protocol for the evaluation of the initiative, rather, since it is a working network, the objectives are set and the events at the global summit are evaluated so far, the first one was carried out one years after creation of the network and took place in the city of Anatolia in Turkey, it is necessary to emphasize that the network has a platform in Internet whose formative content is limited to the members of the network, reason why not all the information is of free access.

We can find cooperation between the cities which are involved but also between the network and governments which support the initiative.
Cooperation and partnerships is created between the different cities that make up the network, both at the level of local authorities and citizens, cooperation is also established between the public sector and the private sector, especially in the exchange of good practices and training, local practitioners, political leaders and stakeholders working to prevent and counter violent extremism are the key of the cooperation.
Some examples:
Regional Capacity Building Workshop – SCN in Lebanon and Jordan: https://goo.gl/4UoHnn
Global Summit 2017: https://goo.gl/djgxJL

No information available

- US, Department of Justice: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/launch-strong-cities-network-strengthen-community-resilience-against-violent-extremism
- SCN: http://strongcitiesnetwork.org/
- ISD: https://www.isdglobal.org/isdapproach/

- Counter – Narrative kit tool: http://www.counternarratives.org/
- Civic Approaches to Confronting Violent Extremism
https://goo.gl/MVy4Ep
- THE IMPACT OF COUNTER-NARRATIVES Insights from a year-long cross-platform pilot study of counter-narrative curation, targeting, evaluation and impact: https://goo.gl/2EmJFd

The Strong Cities Network launched three members’ working groups in May 2016, with specific remits on key areas of local CVE development. Each working group is chaired by an SCN member city, with day-to-day management and research overseen by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
SCN working groups are designed to be collaborative forums for research and best practice sharing between member cities and will run over the course of a year.
The SCN is made up of mayors, municipal-level policy makers and practitioners united in building social cohesion and community resilience against violent extremism in all its forms. The global network is currently made up of more than 100 cities in which Malaga (Spain) is included, is it highly relevant as the SCN provides an important framework of support for sharing best practice and maximizing international learning at the local level.
Benefits for cities include:
- Access to SCN restricted library content
- Access to SCN training modules
- Access to a global network of mayors and municipal-level policy-makers and practitioners
- Participation in the SCN Global Summit and Regional Working Groups
Although we are talking about an international initiative that has 100 cities we must take into account that the cities that are part of the network are cities with large amounts of immigration and in some cases refugees, the initiative is relevant as it manages to unite cities of all the continents.

The initiative is effective as it is based on six fundamental pillars:
- Connect to cities.
- Build bridges of awareness and awareness of existing policies (using a resource library only accessible to network members).
- Inform on the development of local strategies that allow the safeguarding of local communities.
- Innovate in the creation of local policies encouraging with 'Local Innovation Grants'.
- Empowering local communities
- Provide communities with an international platform to report on national and international decisions taken to prevent violent extermination.
- These pillars are developed in four main activities:
SCN Global Summit
Modules Working Groups
Dakar Workshop

It is not possible to measure the efficiency of the initiative according to economic parameters because they do not appear published the budget with which they count and the method of financing as it appears in the open platform is complex to understand.

The impact is positive in that it facilitates communication between cities around the world in the fight against violent extremism, which is not focused on jihadism in all countries, good policy practice is shared and forms In a practical way to the main local actors, the conclusions that appear in the existing working groups and which cover the whole world are quite coherent and take into account the different realities, an example of which is the counter-narrative working group and local communications, which highlights how useless media campaigns and social networks in countries like Mali, where extremists reach the population through oral communication and tradition, so it is necessary innovate in prevention campaigns in these areas.
The weaknesses of the policies are detected in order to be able to find a solution.

The initiative has economic support from several European governments as well as private donors. In addition, the committee is working to increase donations of private origin, started in 2015 with 25 cities and currently has more than 100 so the initiative is expected to be sustainable, at least in the medium term.

The initiative is not fully inclusive since it is the mayors of the cities that are part of them, allows access to training but leaves subtly in the hands of the city council the inclusion of other groups in the initiative, since if the local council considers it appropriate to involve young people and members of associations or groups at risk as participants in such training.