Cultures Interactive e.V. (CI)

Cultures Interactive (CI) is an NGO that works both in local prevention and first-line deradicalisation with at-risk young people that are susceptible to violent rightwing extremism or ethno-nationalism/ religious funda-mentalism – also to xenophobic, racist, and other forms of hateful and exclusionary behaviour. CI works in and alongside both inner-city and rural areas, mostly communities, youth clubs, and school settings, in sin-gular instances also in and with youth prisons. There CI applies the ‘Fair Skills’ deradicalisation approach, which combines youth-cultural workshops with civic education and deradicalisation interventions, anti-bias and democracy pedagogy and modules of prevocational training; furthermore, it adds the element of psychologically based self-awareness group-work.

Since its federal model project ‘Culture Areas’ (Kulturräume) in 2008, CI has continued to develop cross-sectorial ‘Regional Development’ approaches. In this area of work CI promotes human rights and radicalisa-tion awareness in regions/ districts that find themselves strongly afflicted by extremism and hate crime, es-pecially in ex-GDR rural and small town areas of Eastern Germany. Bottom-up youth group interviewing, assessments of the young people's socio-cultural neighbourhoods, training of first-line youth-workers in sensitive areas, and open space and community conferencing is employed. The acquired knowledge is then brought into multi-agency roundtables of community stakeholders from schools, social/ youth work, police and local government.

With regard to practitioner personnel, peer youth-cultural protagonists, civic educators, psychotherapists/ counsellors, and community consultants work together. CI’s ‘Fair Skills’ deradicalisation approach has been chosen as show-case approach by the federal model project evaluation procedures.

A particularly promising aspect of both the ‘Fair Skills’ and the ‘Regional Development’ approach might be that it includes resources from psychotherapy – the open-process self-awareness group – into settings of prevention/ civic education and deradicalisation interventions.

At present, CI develops tools to specifically engage girls/ women and emphasise gender awareness meth-ods within deradicalisation. These innovative methods will then be introduced into the ‘Regional Develop-ment’ approach, above all in Eastern German regions where a demographic gender split aggravates issues of radicalisation and hate crime.

Contact details:

Silke Baer (Berlin)
Peer Wiechmann (Weimar)
Email: info@cultures-interactive.de