The overall objective of ARENAS (Analysis of and Responses to Extremist Narratives) is to characterise, measure and understand the role of extremist narratives in discourses that have an impact on the political and social spheres, but also on the stakeholders themselves. By understanding how these narratives work, ARENAS will empower people to resist them and help foster a spirit of people living together in harmony across Europe.
The ARENAS project, which is led by CY Cergy Paris Université, brings together a consortium of 12 partners from 9 different countries. The project is doubly interdisciplinary: within the SSH, it combines a large number of disciplines and approaches, necessary to precisely circumscribe the stakes of extreme narratives: discourse analysis, history, political sciences, psychology, communication sciences, sociology and anthropology. Links with data scientists constitute an interdisciplinarity partnership between the humanities and computer sciences and engineering. This is in the context of the expanding interaction between SSH and digital-related domains, which is becoming a highly strategic issue because of their increasingly strong ties in opening up sources of knowledge and readily available texts, documents, data, etc
Over the four years of the project, the consortium will develop an in-depth understanding of the major factors contributing to the present rise of extremist narratives and of their influence on mainstream worldviews, discourses and policies across European countries in their local and global context. The ARENAS project will also formulate multi-level policy recommendations to help counter these extremist narratives while limiting their spread and impact.