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Kumar Ramakrishna is Associate Professor and Head of the Centre of Excellence for National Security, a constituent unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A leading Southeast Asian terrorism specialist, he has published extensively on counter-extremism in Southeast Asia. In 2012, his book Radical Pathways: Understanding Muslim Radicalization in Indonesia was identified by Perspectives On Terrorism as one of the top 150 books on terrorism and counter-terrorism as well as “an important and insightful case study on the pathways to extremism and violent jihad in Indonesia”.
The Role of Civil Society in Countering Violent Extremism in Indonesia
The Indonesian experience suggests that an over-reliance on hard power may actually be counter-productive, inadvertently strengthening rather than weakening the violent Islamist extremists. The author explains the need for an indirect strategy in which calibrated hard power is subordinated to and supplemented by softer measures aimed at diminishing the underlying conditions that give rise to violent extremism.
