UGent RadiLab
Who we are
Welcome to RadiLab, the UGent Impact Lab for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE).
RadiLab is a collaboration between Ghent University’s Institute for International Research on Criminal Policy (IRCP), the interdisciplinary research consortium IDC Crime, Criminology and Criminal Policy (IDC Crime), and the business development centre Smart Solutions for Secure Societies (i4S). With over a decade of research and societal impact initiatives in this area, we combine our expertise to provide scientific research, policy, and practice advice and evaluation.
Our group of affiliated researchers contains criminologists, lawyers, psychologists, and other social science disciplines, as well as STEM disciplines such as computer sciences. We have been involved in policy and practice relevant projects funded by the Flemish Government, Belgian Federal Government, the European Commission, the US State Department, and others.
RadiLab is structured with six topic areas (pillars) led by UGent promotors stimulating the research in those areas. The Ghent University researchers are well-recognised and have established collaborations with recognised partners on different topics in the area of P/CVE.Â
What we do
Radilab is a research institution that seeks to bring together knowledge and solutions from various sources to address issues of prevention and countering violent extremism (P/CVE). The institution collaborates with strong partners in academia, public services, private organizations, civil society, and policy to create evidence-based work on P/CVE in Flanders, Belgium, the EU, and the Global South.
Radilab’s work focuses on local P/CVE, organized crime-terror-nexus, law and legislation, resilience, biosocial evolutions, and big-data analytics. By bringing these topics together, the institution creates a unique opportunity to combine expertise to enhance societal impact. Radilab also seeks to partner with Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the Global South to provide UGent staff with reciprocal learning opportunities and exposure to geographic areas that have not yet been prioritized. Radilab conducts research, evaluates policy action plans, and creates tools and instruments to prevent crime and violent extremism by strengthening youth resilience. The institution’s research is relevant to practice, and it has been transferred to practice through the creation of self-evaluation tools for cities and municipalities and other instruments.
Radilab is committed to knowledge dissemination through international channels and is involved in the editorial board of a journal dedicated to P/CVE. The institution’s work is also focused on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and will explore the impact of P/CVE on these goals. Radilab’s members are in the process of creating a joint infrastructure to exchange expertise, infrastructures, and capacity between UGent members from different research groups.
Goals
At RadiLab, we have ambitious goals that center around promoting interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary cooperation in addressing the challenging issues of polarisation, radicalisation, violent extremism, and terrorism. Our mission is to conduct extensive research and develop tools and instruments that can be implemented practically, such as a self-evaluation tool for cities and municipalities to assess multi-actor working in P/CVE and a tool that bolsters youth resilience to prevent crime and violent extremism.
Our efforts are not limited to our local region; we aim to make our tools available in the Global South, thereby generating a positive impact in these regions and accelerating progress. The need to support countries in the Global South in the area of P/CVE has been extensively discussed in previous UGent research. Our studies have explored how we can create the necessary impact in the Global South through education.
Through RadiLab, future researchers and projects within the field of preventing and countering violent extremism can connect and appeal to our international thematic network for expertise.
We are dedicated to making our operations and impact more sustainable not only internally but also externally. RadiLab will create impact on Societal Impact as a topic and the six different thematic topics. We aim to become a competitive global platform and one of the major global actors in the field of P/CVE and inter- and transdisciplinary expertise and capacity building alongside other institutes.