Vol 10, No 2 (2026)
https://doi.org/10.7577/njcie.6463
Article
Preventing Violent Extremism through Education: Policy Lessons from Norway
Antonia Bacigalupa Albaum
Indiana University
Email: tbacigal@iu.edu
Abstract
This article offers a critical policy analysis of Norway’s 2024 Official Report Joint Efforts Against Extremism (NOU 2024: 3), examining how the document frames education’s role in preventing violent extremism (PVE). Over the past decade, Norway has expanded its extremism prevention strategy from security and policing toward social and educational domains, positioning schools as central to democratic resilience. Drawing on Ellefsen et al.’s (2023) identification of three recurring dilemmas in PVE work: civil liberties versus security, local versus national implementation, and intentions versus outcomes, alongside Davies’ (2009) framing of extremism, the analysis interprets how preventive education is constructed at the intersection of democracy and security. The findings reveal that the NOU portrays education as both a safeguard of democratic values and a mechanism of social control, reproducing moral binaries that risk narrowing democratic dialogue. By linking structural policy tensions with pedagogical dilemmas, the study demonstrates how PVE discourse translates national security concerns into moral and educational obligations. The Norwegian case illustrates a broader paradox in contemporary prevention policy: the more education is mobilized to defend a morally defined concept of democracy, the more it risks constraining the pluralism on which democracy depends. This article advances comparative and international education research by examining how PVE policy navigates the interplay of local and national contexts, and how broader theoretical debates of democracy, pluralism, and securitization are translated into educational governance.
Keywords: extremism, education policy, Norway, preventing violent extremism, critical policy analysis
Over the past decade, education has become an increasingly prominent arena for national strategies to prevent violent extremism (PVE). Traditionally, counter-extremism efforts were concentrated in security and military domains (Sjøen & Jore, 2019a), but policymakers have increasingly turned to schools as spaces for building resilience, civic responsibility, and democratic values. This educational turn reflects a growing belief that preventing extremism requires not only policing threats but cultivating the dispositions and competencies thought to sustain democratic life (Stephens et al., 2021). Yet the incorporation of security logic into education has also raised persistent questions about the purposes and limits of schooling (Davies, 2009; Sjøen & Jore, 2019a): Can education prevent extremism without becoming securitized itself? And what happens when the defense of democracy is cast as education’s primary moral obligation?
In Norway, these tensions have come sharply into focus. Following the 2011 terrorist attacks carried out by Anders Behring Breivik, Norwegian authorities expanded their counter-extremism agenda to include education as a key domain of prevention. Over the following decade, policy documents and curricular reforms integrated democratic citizenship, critical thinking, and social cohesion into the language of national security (Sjøen, 2023a). Norway’s work in this area is internationally recognized for its collaborative, welfare-state approach, which treats extremism as a social rather than solely criminal problem. At the same time, Norwegian scholars have warned that this integration risks reproducing surveillance and exclusion under the guise of democratic education (Jore, 2021; Sjøen & Mattsson, 2023). The question is not merely whether education contributes to preventing extremism, but how policy discourse constructs education’s preventive role and with what implications for democracy itself. To further explore this question, this study examines how Norwegian policy constructs education’s role in preventing violent extremism. Methodologically, I employ a critical policy analysis to examine how education is discursively positioned within Norway’s framework for preventing violent extremism. Specifically, I examine the 2024 Joint Efforts Against Extremism NOU to understand how it conceptualizes education’s preventive role, how the framing of the document navigates tensions in education between surveillance and civil liberties, and between moral binaries and pluralistic dialogues.
Literature Review
Definitions and Concepts
Terrorism has traditionally referred to foreign threats, particularly in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 in the United States (Erlenbusch-Anderson, 2022). In the years immediately following, many Western states concentrated their counterterrorism policies on international networks such as al-Qaeda and ISIS. However, after the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings, the European security focus began to shift toward domestic or ‘home-grown’ threats, recognizing that extremist violence increasingly originated within national borders. In Norway, the 2011 terrorist attack carried out by Anders Behring Breivik marked a decisive turning point in the country’s approach to extremism. While this attack initially reinforced attention to Islamic radicalization, right wing extremism did not achieve sustained policy prominence until roughly 2018-2020, when official strategies and the national curriculum began addressing far-right ideology directly (Sjøen, 2023a).
Terrorism can be defined as acts intended to instill fear in society, producing adverse psychological and social effects (Sjøen, 2023a). In this article, the term refers primarily to domestic terrorism, extreme actions designed to spread fear or distrust within the population. Relatedly, radicalization describes the process through which individuals come to adopt extreme beliefs, whereas extremism denotes the state of holding such beliefs. Norwegian policy documents define radicalization as “a process whereby a person or group increasingly condones the use of violence as a means to reach political, ideological or religious goals, and whereby violent extremism may be a result” (Emergency Preparedness Council, 2018, as cited in Hoholm, 2022, p. 50).
Extremism, or the adoption of extreme beliefs positioned as oppositional to democratic values, is often framed in binary moral terms: democracy versus anti-democracy, good versus evil (Sjøen & Mattsson, 2023; Stephens et al., 2021). Such moral dualism can create dilemmas for educators, who may find themselves expected simultaneously to promote democratic commitment and to monitor dissent. In educational settings, framing democracy as the unequivocal ‘good’ risks alienating students whose beliefs fall outside that moral horizon, potentially reinforcing the very sense of exclusion that contributes to radicalization (Davies, 2009).
To address this problem, Lynn Davies (2009) proposes a more educationally grounded definition of extremism: the holding of views that exclude the legitimacy of alternative perspectives or seek to impose one’s beliefs on others. This conception avoids moral binaries by assessing extremism in terms of absolutism rather than ideology. In Davies’ model, democratic education should cultivate the capacity to tolerate ambiguity and multiple truths. From this standpoint, a curriculum that asserts democracy as the only ‘correct’ worldview may itself verge on the absolutist, thereby reproducing the very dynamic it seeks to oppose. Adopting Davies’ lens foregrounds the educational paradox at the heart of PVE: schools charged with protecting democracy must do so through practices that remain open, dialogical, and non-exclusionary.
The far right represents a spectrum of ideologies united by hierarchical and exclusionary notions of identity, most grounded in white, Christian, and heteronormative supremacy. While likely numbering in the low hundreds (Fangen & Carlsson, 2013), the actions of the population of far-right extremists in Norway are often unpredictable and carried out by loosely connected or self-radicalized actors (Fangen & Carlsson, 2013; Ravndal, 2016). This contributes to their failure rates but also makes them less predictable and thus seemingly greater threat.
Scholars typically distinguish between Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) and Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). PVE encompasses broad, upstream initiatives, such as education, that aim to strengthen resilience and social cohesion before radicalization occurs, whereas CVE targets individuals already engaged with extremist movements (Sjøen & Jore, 2019b). Education interventions thus fall primarily within the PVE category. Within the Norwegian context, these efforts are grounded in the national curriculum (LK20) which emphasizes democracy, critical thinking, and human rights to safeguard against radicalization.
Educational Approaches to PVE
Although educational approaches to preventing violent extremism (PVE) vary widely across contexts, research suggests that most fall within several overlapping categories (Gielen, 2019; Sjøen & Jore, 2019b; Skotnes & Sjøen, 2023; Stephens et al., 2021). For this section, I present five broad approaches: building individual resilience, promoting civic and democratic values, developing critical thinking skills, fostering community engagement, and advancing peacebuilding or conflict resolution education.
Resilience-based approaches emphasize strengthening individuals’ cognitive, emotional, and social capacities to resist extremist narratives. Stephens et al. (2021) define resilience in PVE as the cultivation of personal resources such as empathy, moral reasoning, and self-efficacy that help individuals navigate complex social and ideological pressures. In educational contexts, this often includes building character traits, moral perspectives, and civic values. One advantage of this model is its focus on strengths rather than vulnerabilities (Ellefsen & Sjøen, 2023). However, resilience frameworks can inadvertently securitize classrooms when they target students perceived as ‘at risk.’ The United Kingdom’s Prevent strategy illustrates this tension: though framed as resilience-building, it often resulted in surveillance and profiling of Muslim students (Stephens et al., 2021). By contrast, Canada’s community-based resilience model demonstrates that prevention can be successful with highly localized, trust-based approaches (Mitchell, 2016). The model was developed by the Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence (CPRLV), a non-profit in Montreal, Quebec which works to divert cases out of the justice system through community education, help lines, and support groups (Center for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence, 2019). The center built trust with the community through disengaging with the local police force entirely (Mitchell, 2016).
A second, related strand focuses on civic and democracy education, treating the classroom as a site for cultivating democratic norms and participation. In Nordic pedagogy, democracy is seen not merely as a content area but as a practice to be learned through participation (Dalehefte et al., 2022; Sivenbring, 2019). The Norwegian national curriculum (LK20) embeds democracy and human rights across subjects, identifying them as essential competencies for living in a pluralistic society (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017). Democracy education typically includes helping students recognize extremist ideas as anti-democratic, developing digital critical literacy, and practicing deliberative dialogue. Yet, as Davies (2009) cautions, when democracy is presented as the singular moral good, educational initiatives may inadvertently stigmatize dissent, reproducing the same exclusionary logic they intend to prevent.
A third strand, critical thinking education, seeks to equip students with analytical skills to evaluate extremist claims and conspiracy narratives. The approach aligns closely with both resilience and democracy education but emphasizes cognitive engagement with contested information environments, especially online where exposure to content may increase radicalization (Wolfowicz et al., 2022). By learning to evaluate sources, bias, and hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, students can develop what Davies (2009) calls epistemic resilience, the ability to live with ambiguity without retreating into absolutism.
A fourth strand, community engagement, highlights schools as nodes within broader ecosystems of prevention. Collaborative networks among educators, parents, NGOs, and municipal authorities aim to build inclusive environments that counter social isolation and polarization. Norway’s view of counter-extremism as a collective issue also places social pressure on individuals across society, including school staff, to participate in PVE efforts (Forebygging av ekstremisme og radikalisering | Et Nettsted Fra RVTS, n.d.). These efforts reflect Norway’s broader welfare-state orientation, in which social institutions share collective responsibility for prevention (Jore, 2021).
Finally, peacebuilding and conflict resolution education provides an integrative framework that connects PVE with long-standing traditions in education for peace and human rights. Østby et al. (2019) identify education as a means for reducing political violence. Rather than framing extremism as a pathology to be corrected, peace education treats it as a failure of dialogue and mutual understanding. Incorporating these perspectives within PVE situates prevention within a broad humanistic commitment to co-existence, resonant with Norway’s curricular emphasis on respect, critical reflection, and civic participation.
Together, these five strands underscore that PVE in education is not a discrete program but a constellation of practices that interact with existing pedagogical commitments. Each approach brings distinct benefits and risks, and their success depends on how they are locally interpreted and embedded within schools’ democratic cultures.
Understanding PVE Through the Lens of Norway
Since 2010, Europe has experienced a resurgence of domestic terrorism (Adamcová & Burrell, 2022), prompting governments to expand counter-extremism strategies beyond policing and intelligence. The United Kingdom’s Prevent policy, heavily criticized for securitizing education, demonstrates how well-intentioned prevention efforts can undermine trust and inclusivity (Durodie, 2016; Gielen, 2019). France, by contrast, has seen the mainstreaming of far-right political movements that blur the line between political expression and extremism (Byman, 2022). In many European states, early PVE initiatives centered primarily on Islamic radicalization and foreign fighter recruitment. Norway’s approach diverges in key respects: it arose from a far-right attack at home and has since sought to address both Islamist and right-wing extremism with a common framework.
The 2011 attacks by Anders Behring Breivik marked Norway’s deadliest peacetime tragedy, catalyzing a decade of intensive policy innovation. In their aftermath, Norway produced security plans from 2011-2015 that largely focused on Islamic extremism, gradually expanding PVE into social and educational domains (Meld. St. 37 (2014-2015); Norwegian Ministry of Justice and the Police, 2011; 2014). Right-wing extremism did not dominate official discourse until 2018, when national policy documents began explicitly referring to it. The creation of the Centre for Research on Extremism (C-REX) institutionalized research on right-wing violence and policy response (Ravndal, 2016). The Norwegian Official Report Joint Efforts Against Extremism (NOU 2024: 3) thus represents the latest stage in this trajectory, signaling a formal shift of responsibility for developing and publishing the document from the Ministry of Justice and Public Security to the Ministry of Culture, an evolution from a security paradigm to one grounded in civic and social policy. While right-wing extremism did not gain national policy prominence until the late 2010s, right-wing extremism nonetheless was prevalent and required responses in smaller communities and municipalities during the 1990s and 2000s. Local municipalities addressed this violence through frameworks and policy documents, though without a national framework to guide their efforts (Carlsson, 2006).
Cross-society collaboration, now central to Norwegian PVE rhetoric, is not entirely new. Community-based initiatives to counter racism and right-wing extremism date back to the 1990s and 2000s (Fangen & Carlsson, 2013), though recent policy has deepened and institutionalized these partnerships. Today, municipalities play a major role in coordinating education, welfare, and policing to implement local prevention strategies. This localization reflects a broader Nordic commitment to social trust and participatory governance. It also situates schools as critical sites where democracy education, inclusion, and resilience intersect with national security concerns (NOU, 2024: 3).
Norway’s position within the European context makes it a compelling case for policy analysis. Unlike in the UK, where prevention has been criticized for coercive overreach, or in France, where PVE remains entangled with politics, Norway’s welfare-state model embeds prevention within trust-based relational infrastructures.
Yet this model also carries contradictions: by integrating security goals into educational and social policies, it risks normalizing securitization through benevolent discourse that creates a good/evil binary around security, highlighting the good and risking heightened vigilance subpopulations (Sjøen & Mattsson, 2023). Examining how the 2024 NOU articulates these tensions, between protection and freedom; inclusion and surveillance, therefore provides insight into the enduring dilemmas of democratic education in an age of security politics.
Theoretical Framework
This analysis draws on two complementary perspectives. Ellefsen et al. (2023) identify three recurring dilemmas in the prevention of radicalization and violent extremism: the balance between civil liberties and security, the tension between local and national implementation, and the gap between policy intentions and outcomes. These dilemmas provide a lens for examining how Joint Efforts Against Extremism constructs education’s preventive role across sectors. To situate these policy dilemmas within educational practice, the study also employs Davies’ (2009) theorization of democratic education, which warns that initiatives framed as protecting democracy can inadvertently reproduce binary moral logics of good vs. evil, risking the exclusion of dissenting voices. Together, these frameworks enable a dual analysis: Ellefsen et al. illuminate structural tensions in PVE policy design, while Davies reveals the pedagogical paradox that arises when education is tasked with countering extremism.
Critical policy analysis (CPA) is an analytical lens that examines the relationship between policy development, implementation, and broader power structures in society (Apple, 2019). Rather than treating policy as a neutral instrument, CPA attends to the full life cycle of policy, from problem formation and conceptualization to interpretation and enactment. In this study, I interpret policy development documents in dialogue with the academic literature to illuminate the tensions and contradictions policymakers may have navigated in constructing the policy framework.
From this perspective, policy is understood as a form of discourse. Discourse is not approached merely as communication (textual, spoken, or embodied), but as productive: it generates meanings, subject positions, and moral expectations with the impact of influencing behavior and thought in society (Foucault, 1982). Viewed through this lens, education is not simply a site of knowledge transmission but a moral and political practice. Consequently, policies that seek to prevent violent extremism through education are inherently value-laden, embedding normative assumptions about democracy, citizenship, and acceptable forms of belief and conduct.
Method
Because this article focuses on the meaning-making of PVE rather than the implementation of concrete measures, the NOU provides a richer data source than the Meld. St. 13 (2024-2025), which primarily directs the actions of various ministries and agencies. The analysis draws on the dilemmas identified by Ellefsen et al. (2023) and the educational lens proposed by Davies (2009) to interpret how the policy constructs education’s role in preventing violent extremism. The study addresses the following research questions:
1. How does the 2024 Joint Efforts Against Extremism conceptualize education’s role in preventing violent extremism?
2. How does this framing navigate, or reproduce, tensions between civil liberties and security, between local and national implementation, and between policy expectations and outcomes?
3. In what ways do the policy’s assumptions about democracy education reflect the tensions between moral binaries and pluralistic dialogue?
As an education researcher, this analysis is shaped by my interest in how policy constructs the moral purposes of schooling rather than by evaluating programmatic effectiveness or security outcomes. This reflects a constructivist stance focused on how meaning is produced through discourse, including how concepts such as democracy, resilience, and extremism are mobilized to guide educational practice. My position outside policymaking institutions provides analytical distance, while also introducing the limitation that interpretations privilege questions of coherence, framing, and implication over administrative or operational concerns. Methodologically, I developed this study from a constructivist tradition, treating policy texts as socially produced artifacts that reflect and shape power relations rather than as neutral instruments.
Data
The primary source for analysis is the Norwegian Official Report Joint Efforts Against Extremism: Better Conditions for Preventative Work (NOU 2024: 3). The report was prepared by a Royal Commission appointed in June 2022 and marks a significant institutional shift of authorship from the Ministry of Justice and Public Security to the Ministry of Culture and Equality, signalling a broadening of PVE from a security norm to a social and educational norm (NOU 2024: 3).
Analytic Procedure
The document was read in full, and all passages referring to education were highlighted, and then coded deductively to the three dilemmas identified by Ellefsen et al. (2023) and to Davies’ (2009) framework to identify how democratic education is framed, particularly whether policy discourse reinforces or resists moral dualisms. Once passages were coded, each grouping was reviewed for consistency across included codes. No coding software was used during this process, instead document close reading and coding was completed manually using a PDF reader and word document. This approach enables a systematic yet interpretive analysis of how education’s preventive role is discursively constructed.
Limitations
This study is based on a single-case document analysis, which necessarily limits the generalizability of its findings to other policy documents or national contexts. The analysis focuses on Norway’s Official Report Joint Efforts Against Extremism (NOU 2024: 3), a relatively concise document that outlines the national PVE framework across multiple governmental sectors. As a cross-sector policy text, the NOU allocates limited, though analytically significant, space to education alongside the responsibilities of the Ministries of Justice and Public Security, Education, Digitalisation and Public Governance, and Labour and Welfare. Consequently, the educational discourse examined here is shaped by brevity and condensation, resulting in fewer extended passages available for quotation and close textual analysis.
In addition, the study adopts a discursive and interpretive approach, prioritizing how education’s preventive role is constructed in policy rather than assessing the effectiveness or outcomes of implementation. While this enables a critical examination of underlying assumptions, tension, and moral framings within the documents, it limits the scope for evaluating how these policy articulations translate into practice or how they compare empirically with subsequent policy instruments, such as the final white paper (St. Mld. 13 (2024-2025)) or local implementation strategies. These limitations reflect the study’s analytical focus rather than methodological shortcomings and point to directions for future research, including comparative analyses across policy stages and empirical investigation of how educators interpret and enact PVE policy in practice.
Results and Discussion
The following section presents the findings from this document analysis of Joint Efforts Against Extremism (NOU 2024: 3), guided by Ellefsen et al.’s (2023) three policy dilemmas: balancing civil liberties and security, negotiating local and national implementation, and reconciling intention with outcomes. The analysis examines how the Official Report NOU 2024: 3 frames education’s preventative role within Norway’s broader PVE strategy. To situate these tensions within educational practice, the discussion also draws on Davies’ (2009) theory of democratic education, which highlights how efforts to protect democracy can inadvertently reproduce binary moral logics that constrain pluralism and dialogue. Together, these frameworks illuminate how the NOU constructs education as both a vehicle for democratic resilience and a potential site of securitization. The results are organized thematically around four interrelated areas reflecting these dilemmas and their educational manifestations.
Defining Extremism and Democracy: Competing Discourses
The Joint Efforts Against Extremism report defines extremism in two ways: a narrow definition, “the acceptance and use of violence to achieve political, ideological, or religious goals,” and a “broad” definition, encompassing “attitudes and actions that reject democracy and human rights” (NOU, 2024: 3, p. 6). The former aligns with Davies’ (2009) conception of extremism as absolutism, that is, belief systems that deny the legitimacy of alternative viewpoints. Whereas the latter situates extremism as the moral opposite of democracy itself. This definitional ambiguity echoes debates in PVE literature. As Sjøen and Mattsson (2023) and Sivenbring (2019) observe, democracy education is often cast as a moral safeguard against extremism, yet this framing can entrench a binary logic in which democracy represents the unquestioned good and dissenting perspectives the evil to be eradicated. Davies (2009) warns that such binary framings risk turning classrooms into spaces of ideological correction rather than critical dialogue.
The NOU reproduces precisely this tension. By asserting that “strengthening democracy […] must be a goal of P/CVE” (p. 9) it merges prevention with normative socialization. The result is a narrowing of acceptable discourse: the democratic citizen becomes the only legitimate subject position. While this framing signals moral clarity and may align with the broader collective goals within a society, it limits education’s capacity to foster the pluralism and contestation that sustain democracy when enforced in educational settings.
Local and National Implementation: Scaling DEMBRA
Research on Norwegian PVE policy consistently highlights tensions between national coordination and local flexibility. Ellefsen et al. (2023) describe how early PVE policies centralized responsibility in the Ministry of Justice before shifting toward multi-sector collaboration. At the municipal level, schools have become critical actors, yet scholars such as Jore (2021) and Sjøen (2023b) caution that local empowerment without adequate resourcing often leads to symbolic compliance rather than meaningful prevention.
Against this backdrop, the Joint Efforts report recommends further supporting the DEMBRA program (Democratic Preparedness Against Antisemitism and Racism). In 2013, the DEMBRA initiative was established to guide primary and secondary schools in developing contextualized approaches to combating extremism within their school communities (Dalehefte et al., 2022). Scaled nationally, six research centers across Norway guide school staff through a process of identifying extremist threats to their school communities and developing tailored curricular approaches to strengthen their communities and prevent radicalization among students. The NOU proposes that DEMBRA “be strengthened as a nationwide programme for pupils and teachers, also for schools in rural areas” (Joint Efforts Against Extremism, 2024, p. 12) and that the implementation of LK20 curriculum guidelines on democracy and inclusion “must be bolstered through the skills development grant scheme” (p. 12). These measures seek to extend successful local experiments across the national system. This move exemplifies the local/national dilemma articulated by Ellefsen et al. (2023). DEMBRA’s early success derived from its localized process in which schools co-developed responses suited to their contexts (Dalehefte et al., 2022). By nationalizing the program, Norway risks transforming a relational initiative into a standardized compliance program. Still, Joint Efforts’ recommendation to “formaliz[e] pathfinding programs for additional minorities” (2024, p. 9) demonstrates an awareness of diversity and the need for contextual adaptation. In this respect, Norway’s PVE policy illustrates a dynamic negotiation between coherence and responsiveness, reflecting the ambition of cross-sector collaboration.
Civil Liberties and Security: The Displaced Dilemma
In European PVE discourse, education’s preventive role has often been entangled with security imperatives. Studies of the United Kingdom’s Prevent strategy show how surveillance expectations placed on teachers compromised trust and stigmatized Muslim students (Durodie, 2016; Gielen, 2019). More recently, European PVE discourse has moved toward a non-ideological approach to PVE which lessens the risk of stigmatizing subpopulations of students (Loewendorf et al., 2023). However, Norwegian scholars (Sjøen & Jore, 2019a) have nonetheless warned that assigning educators a quasi-policing role can undermine democratic pedagogy.
The Joint Efforts report, however, treats the liberty-security question as a matter for intelligence and policing rather than for education. It stresses that “democratic control is necessary when national authorities[…]adopt new technologies to prevent extremism” (NOU, 2024: 3, p. 8) but remains silent on analogous risks in schools. The result is a displacement of the civil-liberties dilemma: security oversight is acknowledged in the hard sectors but presumed unnecessary in the soft sector of education.
This omission is revealing. By presenting schools as inherently benevolent spaces of prevention, the policy sidesteps the potential for educational securitization. In doing so, it depoliticizes the classroom and exempts education from the critical scrutiny applied elsewhere in PVE policy. What Ellefsen et al. (2023) identify as a central democratic dilemma (balancing liberty and security) thus reappears in the NOU not as an educational concern but as an institutional blind spot.
Intentions and Outcomes: Skill-Building
After more than a decade of PVE experimentation, Norway’s approach reflects what Apple (2019) calls the temporal layering of policy – new initiatives reinterpret but barely resolve past contradictions. The Joint Efforts Commission’s proposal that “skills-building programmes in P/CVE should systematically be made available to school staff” (NOU, 2024: 3, p. 11) continues this trajectory. The intention is capacity-building and professionalization, yet the emphasis on ‘skills’ signals a technocratic reframing of prevention.
This shift illustrates the intentions-outcomes dilemma (Ellefsen et al., 2023): inclusionary intentions generate procedural outcomes. The policy’s promise of empowerment risks morphing into a regime of competence measurement and compliance. Earlier Norwegian experience underscores this risk. Sjøen (2023b) found that teachers are often experienced PVE training as risk management rather than democratic pedagogy. Similarly, the United Kingdom’s Prevent program, designed to build resilience, led to self-censorship and mistrust (Stephens et al., 2021). In the NOU, skill-building is framed as a route to democratic resilience, but the mechanism is technical rather than relational. As Davies (2009) cautions, when prevention is reduced to procedural expertise, moral judgement is displaced by managerialism. The likely outcome is that teachers become frontline implementers of preventative policy rather than facilitators of critical citizenship. Thus, despite its inclusive rhetoric, the NOU’s proposals risk reproducing the very depoliticization and rigidity they seek to overcome.
Across these four dilemmas, the Joint Efforts Against Extremism reflects the central paradox of contemporary PVE policy: democracy is treated as both an end and a means of control. Definitions of extremism reaffirm moral binaries; national coordination constrains local autonomy; liberty is defended in policing but ignored in pedagogy; and empowerment devolves into technical training. These tensions are not policy failures but structural features of prevention itself. Norway’s approach exemplifies what Ellefsen et al. (2023) describe as the ‘double bind’ of democratic security: to safeguard openness, states must govern it.
Conclusion
The objective of this study was to examine how Norway’s Official Report Joint Efforts Against Extremism (NOU 2024:3) constructs the role of education in preventing violent extremism, and to analyze how this construction reflects enduring tensions between democracy, security, and pluralism. For policy and educational practice, this analysis contributes by clarifying how well-intentioned, trust-based prevention frameworks can nonetheless reproduce forms of moral regulation and constrain democratic dialogue when educational responsibility is aligned too closely with security objectives. The document positions education as a cornerstone of democratic resilience, yet the very logic that renders schools responsible for safeguarding democracy also risks transforming them into instruments of moral governance. By tracing how the NOU negotiates civil liberties and security, national coherence and local autonomy, and the gap between intentions and outcomes, the study reveals that Norway’s PVE strategy continues to balance on a paradoxical edge where democracy is treated as the end to be protected and the means through which protection is exercised.
While Norway views education and democracy education as important factors in their PVE policy, many of the commission's recommendations nonetheless are based on securitizing society and implementing counterterrorism measures through the Ministry of Justice (NOU, 2024: 3). Sjøen (2019) points out that this focus on securitization may reflect international pressures and has led to self-censorship by the Muslim community in Norway. While the promise of democratic education in Norway shows success, Sjøen (2019) cautions against overstating the overall success of Norway’s policies as the criticism of over-securitization may also apply to Norway.
The analysis shows that the NOU conceptualizes education as both a moral safeguard and a mechanism of societal regulation. It navigates the three dilemmas (Ellefsen et al., 2023) unevenly: the local-national dilemma is explicitly addressed through scaling DEMBRA; the intention-outcome dilemma surfaces in promoting skill-building without clear evidence that the skill-building leads to prevention through community-building; and the liberty-security dilemma is displaced from education entirely, revealing a blind spot in the policy’s assumptions. Through Davies’ (2009) lens, the framing of democracy as a moral binary rather than a dialogical practice reproduces binary logics that risk narrowing educational space for pluralism. On the other hand, the contrasting definitions of extremism (broad and narrow) within the policy indicate an awareness of the tensions presented by Davies.
Theoretically, this analysis advances understanding of educational PVE by bringing Ellefsen et al.’s (2023) structural policy dilemmas into conversation with Davies’ (2009) critique of moral binaries in democratic education. This dual framework exposes how PVE discourse translates macro-level tensions into micro-level pedagogical expectations for teachers and students. It also demonstrates how preventative education can reproduce the very exclusions it seeks to overcome when democracy is defined in absolute rather than dialogical terms. In this respect, Norway’s experience illuminates a broader pattern visible across liberal democracies: the more education is mobilized to defend democracy, the more it risks narrowing the democratic imagination.
Policy-wise, the Norwegian case offers a cautionary lens. Jore (2021) points out that, over time, what has changed radically about Norwegian counter-terrorism policy is how its transformation into a social welfare issue reframed it into an accepted approach part of the public good rather than a potential infringement of civil liberties. This shift is driven by a focus on the individual, moving the focus away from structural or political factors. This has the potential of delegitimizing legitimate political complaints. In education, this can contradict the values of a ‘good’ education by disallowing political dissent and discourse. However, disallowing dissent may be in alignment with the Nordic education’s model which is, to some extent, based on the social democratic virtue of sacrificing individual liberty when it violates the collective’s interest (Ryymin, 2019). The case of Norway highlights how schools walk a fine line between promoting free speech and civil discussion and creating social stigmatization and exclusion of social groups to the detriment of society as a whole.
Additionally, efforts to scale programs like DEMBRA must preserve the dialogical and context-responsive features that made them effective, rather than turning them into standardized compliance mechanisms. PVE training for educators should prioritize relational competence, ethical reflexivity, and political literacy over procedural skill-building alone. Finally, definitional work matters: reframing extremism not as the antithesis of democracy but as a challenge to pluralism would align prevention with democratic pedagogy rather than moral policing.
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