Break it Down: An Alternative Approach to Measuring Effectiveness in Counterterrorism

Abstract

The author reviews the ways in which the effectiveness of counterterrorism measures and policies has been assessed and argues that these approaches suffer largely from the same difficulties. For many of the chosen indicators, it is not clear whether they represent effectiveness and whether shifts in the scores can be attributed to counterterrorism. After discussing these problems, the author outlines a different way of measuring counterterrorism effectiveness. This method rests on the assumption that counterterrorism should be broken down into separate components that should all be evaluated separately.

KEYWORDS:

• Counterterrorism
• effectiveness
• evaluation