Malaysia is being challenged with an increasingly polarised society, interethnic and religious tensions is on the rise, the widening gap of inequity, increasing online presence for hateful extremism and a fractured political landscape. Now, more than ever Malaysia needs to come together but this can only happen if our community is resilient and there is enough empathy from everyone.
In response, IMAN Research conducted an in-house research project that investigated the existence of violent extremism tendencies in Malaysian youths. Findings indicated that there were risk factors (lacking empathy, manipulativeness, ethnocentrism etc.) in youths that would make them susceptible to believing and supporting violent extremism.
As per our recommendations of the study, IMAN decided to embark on designing a capacity building program to address this issue by focussing on the areas of resilience and empathy in order to manage these risk factors in youths. After many discussions and a pilot-run of the module, we currently have a functional module for use.
The module will cover aspects cognitive-emotional resilience, interpersonal community relations, and engagement of societal narratives all of which would develop resilient and civilly engaged individuals to have an aggregative effect to the wider nation as a whole.
