Implementation period: April 2023 – March 2026. The project is implemented by: 17 consortium partners coming from 14 different countries. Kosovar Center for Security Studies (KCSS) is a consortium partner of the “OppAttune – Countering Oppositional Political Extremism Through Attuned Dialogue: Track, Attune, Limit” research project for Horizon Europe 2023.
OppAttune is bringing together an ambitious multi-disciplinary team of academics and practitioners to examine the evolution of political extremism and its influence on social and political dialogue with the aim to track, attune and limit the spread of extreme oppositional narratives.
Through a track, attune and limit conceptual framework, OppAttune will form a vital bridge between benchmarking everyday extremism at one end and the development of an Attunement Model at the other enabling ordinary citizens to navigate oppositional us/them political environments without polarising into hostile extreme positions.
The OppAttune consortium responds to these challenges and threats to democracy through three objectives:
1. To track the evolution of extreme political narratives within media, local ecologies and living democracies and establish the psychological, sociological and anthropological drivers of extremism.
2. To attune capacity for public dialogue by modelling how the evolution of extreme political narratives impact social and political dialogue.
3. To limit the rise of extreme political narratives and their potential to become violent political transformations disrupting democratic processes such as democratic elections.
Delivering on these objectives, enables OppAttune to contribute to the challenges outlined by the European Democratic Action Plan (EDAP), including the key challenge of how to strengthen democratic resilience. OppAttune’s main innovation will be to develop an Attunement Model will enable citizens within six key target groups – the general public, young citizens, media influencers, practitioners & policymakers, political actors and the scientific research community – to understand, analyse and develop democratic capacity to engage in public dialogue within oppositional politics. OppAttune will implement this Attunement Model within Year 3 and provide the European Commission with recommendations and strategies for build citizen’s democratic capacity to operate within oppositional political environments, in particular the ability to detect and reject extreme narratives. OppAttune does this by explicitly focusing on both the means through which democratic practices are engaged in shared and circulated that potentially threaten democratic practices by promoting extremism narratives.
