The security research project TRIVALENT, promoted by Z&P and its European partners under the coordination of the University “Roma Tre”, was funed by the European Commission under Grant Agreement no. 740934.

TRIVALENT (Terrorism pReventIon Via rAdicaLisation countEr-NarraTive) is a research project funded by the EC Horizon 2020 programme. Its objective is to develop counter-narratives to prevent and contrast violent radicalisation, by combining theoretical tools with operational measures.

Various studies have demonstrated that, in European countries, radicalisation phenomena often take place with the help of ad hoc-developed radicalising narratives. Those narratives are spread in a number of ways: via Internet as well as verbally within families, schools and more in general in any kind of meeting place. Their effectiveness has been proven especially towards specific groups of vulnerable personalities, as for example young people in search of their identity, discriminated and emarginated individuals. It is in particular inside prisons that the radicalisation process has found fertile ground in latest years. One of the most tragic demonstrations in that sense comes from Anis Amri, once a low-profile criminal before radicalising during his stay in Italian prisons and becoming the author of the 2016 massacre at Berlin Christmas markets.

The TRIVALENT project aims to identify, also with the employment of data and text mining techniques, the main radicalising narratives circulating in European countries. The narratives will be studied in order to identify their characterising elements and the ways they are disseminated, so to elaborate various kinds of measures for contrasting their spreading, including the production of dedicated counter-narratives.

The TRIVALENT consortium can rely on the support of 11 police bodies (Italian, Albanian, Polish and Latvian police; Italian and Portuguese penitentiary police; Italian, Polish, Spanish and Belgian local polices) and local ones, driven by a pool of top level universities and public/private research centres. The participation of institutional actors to the project will make possible for the researchers of the consortium, during the 36 months of project duration, to interact with subjects under custody and to analyse with them the radicalising dynamics in place in various European prisons.

TRIVALENT flyer (ENG)

TRIVALENT flyer (ITA)