Last week, top city officials and community leaders from Bangladesh, India, The Maldives and Sri Lanka gathered in Kolkata to establish a network of expertise across South Asia, to build peaceful communities and prevent violent extremism.

The South Asia Regional Practitioners Workshop was led by ISD’s Strong Cities Network (SCN) and brought together over 30 municipal-level and frontline practitioners from across the region. It was a unique opportunity for the group to share best practice and provided attendees with training and resources to challenge violence, hate and polarisation in their cities.

Over two days, the SCN underlined the need for South Asia’s thriving civil society sector to work more closely with cities and local government. Across the workshop, community leaders drew up plans to coordinate, together with national and international partners, effective and targeted efforts to prevent inter-communal, religious and ethnic violence, tackling social polarisation in the world’s fastest growing cities.

In partnership with Facebook and the Commonwealth, ISD set out an agenda to harness, support and scale the extraordinary efforts of localised initiatives, engagement programmes and intervention pilots. For the 15 cities represented, and the more than 500 civil society initiatives which fed into the training, the SCN workshop spells an end to isolation, connecting frontline practitioners and local-level leaders throughout the region and crossing countless religious, ethnic, sectarian, socio-economic and political divides. 

Edward Jackson, Senior Programme Manager at ISD: “We were delighted to host the first regional practitioners workshop in South Asia in Kolkata. The workshop was designed to equip city leaders from across the region with the information, resources and connections they need to develop effective prevention strategies that build local resilience, pre-empt division and prevent violence.”

Craig Hall, U.S. Consul General in Kolkata: “The United States and India are strategic partners in the fight against violent extremism in South Asia. The United States values India’s role in protecting and extending global security and stability and welcomes India's vision to geographically extend its contribution to promoting peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific.”