Interests, ideas, and institutions: framing the Italian P/CVE approach

This article investigates how Italian policymakers framed prevention of radicalization during the parliamentary debates on the ‘Dambruoso–Manciulli’ draft law, Italy’s first standalone national prevention initiative. As Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) has become central to complementing states’ counterterrorism strategies, Italy remains one of the few Western countries without a coherent national policy, relying instead on fragmented regional and local efforts. Yet this absence signals more than a policy gap; it reveals a structural deficit in which prevention defaults to security responses, leaving the deeper social and institutional drivers of radicalization unaddressed. Drawing on the interests-ideas-institutions (3Is) framework and qualitative frame analysis, the study examines the verbatim stenographic records of the two plenary sessions of the Chamber of Deputies in 2017. The article reveals fragmentation in policymakers’ framings, marked by ideological contestation over a multiculturalism paradigm that misaligns with integration efforts, and institutional mismatch between radicalization prevention and the security apparatus designed to counter domestic subversion. In a context where empirical data on Italian P/CVE remain limited, this study illustrates how policy discourse constructs and constrains the meaning of prevention, offering insights for comparative and longitudinal research on P/CVE.