The later programmes and reports show the full extension of the policy field beyond classic counter-terrorism. Conferences on violent extremism in prisons (WP1115, July 2011) emphasised prison management, staff training, humane treatment, tailored interventions, and multi-agency coordination. Other events addressed the role of religion and religious actors, peace process design in Afghanistan, the nexus between firearms trafficking and terrorism, and the centrality of gender dynamics in violent extremism.
Technological change also necessitated further examination of online jihadism (WP1082 ‘Tackling online jihad: understanding the issues and how to respond?’ January – February 2011, again with RICU). This programme shows a CT system grappling with the nuances of online extremism amid the emergence of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and learning lessons from other agencies, including the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP). Participants are drawn from inside and outside of the system, with senior officials from the UK, US and Saudi Arabia alongside communications specialists with job titles like ‘Chief Storyteller’.
Three Commonwealth-focused conferences between 2019 and 2022 (WP1701 ‘Managing, preventing and countering violent extremism across the Commonwealth’, WP1793V ‘Meeting of the Commonwealth Cadre of CVE Experts, and WP2032 ‘Commonwealth CVE Cadre meeting’) deepen the impression of a system understanding violent extremism’s place in wider issues. These events, in partnership with the Commonwealth’s Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Cadre of Experts and the Commonwealth Secretariat’s CVE unit, emphasise the importance of youth, women and girls, resilience, peer learning, and whole-of-society prevention across Commonwealth states. The language is notably multilateral and preventive rather than reactive or emergency-driven.
Meanwhile, Syria-focused dialogues (WP1723 ‘Experts Meeting: Developing a shared approach to families of Daesh fighters in North-East Syria’, October 2019) approaches newly created camps and detention facilities not purely as residual security risks, but as sites of humanitarian concern, citing repatriation dilemmas, and reintegration challenges. This willingness to grasp the human security aspects of the global campaign against Daesh is perhaps evidence of learning from the previous era of responding to AQ’s attacks through a primarily military-security lens.
A sequence of dialogues in the late 2010s re-visited themes from earlier phases, as well as connecting terrorism and violent extremism with some of Wilton Park’s most enduring themes: WP1475 (2016) and WP1599 (2018) address the role of religion in radicalisation and violent extremism; WP1511 from November 2016 looks at radicalisation in Africa; WP1630 directly addresses gender dynamics in violent extremism. There is a suggestion from this period here that the continued dominance of CT as a foreign policy issue meant that CT was the only available lens through which to talk about development, faith, and gender, rather than the other way round.
By the 2020s, Wilton Park’s CT and CVE work was operating at the intersection of humanitarian governance, multilateral coordination, and long-term social stabilisation. This may indicate a recognition that, in light of a wave of terrorist activity emanating from Iraq and Syria (including a sequence of violent attacks in the UK in 2017), that the ‘hard’ approaches of the early GWoT era had not defeated terrorism or associated ideologies. Furthermore, it was becoming obvious that the appeal of these ideologies had actually broadened, as evidenced by large numbers of women and young people who had left the UK to join the so-called Caliphate. This naturally brought the focus onto issues of community as well as the imminent threat from overseas terrorist actors.
One illustration of the long arc of CT response comes from the focus on communications. A March 2015 conference (WP140) had asked how to challenge and counter the innovative and highly successful ISIL/Daesh brand, which was then at its very peak. The fact that this dialogue arrives so quickly after the establishment of the ‘Islamic State’ in 2014 stands in stark contrast to the seven years it took between 9/11 and the first mention of AQ as a ‘brand’ in March 2008 (WP897); this perhaps reflects some of the learning Wilton Park sessions had helped instil.
By 2023, the ISIL ‘Caliphate’ had been militarily defeated, and threat of mass-casualty attacks in the UK had diminished. However, an event on ‘Defeating Daesh’s post-territorial brand’ (WP3050 January 2023), in partnership with the Global Coalition Against Daesh and the UK-based Counter-Daesh Communications Cell, revisited the terrorism problem in a new form. Participants analysed Daesh’s post-territorial brand, its global affiliates, online ecosystems, grievance narratives, and the need for a holistic response integrating strategic communications, stabilisation, development, and conflict prevention. In the course of just over twenty years, the challenge for the UK had moved from neutralising a band of clandestine overseas attack operatives, to trying to marginalise a diffuse, adaptive, and networked extremist brand.
The most recent evolution of the CT and CVE landscape can be seen in Wilton Park’s counter-extremism dialogues from 2025 and 2026: WP3525 ‘Countering Extremism and wider harms’ and WP3681 ‘Building a new counter-extremism and democratic resilience approach for today and the future’). Both events feature the trusted Wilton Park formula of policy officials engaging with academics, experts and counterparts from overseas, offering space for the UK government to think freely. However, the contrast from the early days is profound. Rather than a focus on a singular group of ideologically committed and battle-hardened extremists threatening the UK from overseas, the threat is described as much broader, more diffuse, and more online, with significant proportions of the UK population shown to be holding views that would be deemed ‘extreme’; moreover, these view were no longer tied to purely diaspora communities. The prescriptions – the defence of democracy, the regulation of the online space, and the renewal of the social contract – reveals a problem that genuinely involves the whole of society.