This paper will present the main findings of a major original fieldwork that was conducted in the borderlands of South Libya and Northern Sudan in 2021 on addressing and preventing violent extremism. A comprehensive survey/questionnaire was developed and deployed examining pull and push factors in the domain of violent extremism, and 3000 households were surveyed and interviewed by a large team of field researcher in South Libya and Northern Sudan. The analysis and presentation of the original gathered data will constitute the core of this paper and it will reflect on issues related to local communities’ experience with armed groups, recruitment dynamics, use, spread, trade, and ownership of small arms and light weapons, as well as on personal perceptions, dispositions, values with plausible effect vis-á-vis countering and preventing violent extremism. The paper will shed light on local experiences in addressing, interacting with, and preventing/confronting violent extremism that are contextualized within a broader regional setting, and it will also situate the analysis in a critical security studies conceptual framework. Approaching the policy-relevant issue of preventing violent extremism from a critical academic and scholarly perspective will challenge and problematize some key features of the commonly perceived “conventional wisdom” in this domain, and expand and explore other elements and features using the original and new qualitative and qualitative insights gathered from the field. The conclusions of this paper will go well beyond the contexts of South Libya and Northern Sudan as they will draw lessons to the wider region of the Middle East and North Africa, especially in the conflict-ridden settings.