12 Peacebuilding Strategies for the White American Insurgency

Strategies for when extremism is mainstream

How do we prevent further violent attacks in the US? In the short term, the impeachment of former President Trump and the arrests and charges made against the insurgents who stormed the Capitol offer a necessary first step toward accountability for the deaths and destruction on January 6. But over the next 20–40 years, Americans will need a strategy to address the mainstream embrace of white supremacy, which is a violent extremist ideology.

The Biden Administration labels the ideology justifying the January 6th siege as “Domestic Violent Extremism.” Violent extremist ideologies inspire terrorist acts that aim to invoke fear with dramatic attacks against civilians. US counterinsurgency experts have been warning that the armed political movement behind the siege should be thought of as an “insurgency,” defined as “organized use of subversion and violence to seize, nullify, or challenge political control.”

For those of us who worked on a peacebuilding approach to violent extremism and terrorism in Afghanistan, Iraq, and dozens of other countries over the last three decades, we know that reducing threats from an insurgency requires separating the insurgents from their base of support in the population. This is no easy…