Mapping counterterrorism: a categorisation of policies and the promise of empirically based, systematic comparisons

Abstract

This article describes the development and application of a framework to compare national counterterrorism policies. It discusses the state of the art regarding concepts, frameworks and inventories to compare counterterrorism policies, explains the logic behind our own framework, briefly describes the application to ten European Union Member States, and then formulates an empirically based categorisation of counterterrorism policies. It is shown that the counterterrorism policies of the nine European states differ fundamentally. The concluding section sums up the findings and addresses some possibilities for the practical application of a framework of this kind.

Keywords:

• counterterrorism
• comparative analysis
• benchmarking
• European Union

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was undertaken as part of the Transnational Terrorism, Security and the Rule of Law (TTSRL) project. For more information, see http://www.transnationalterrorism.eu/

Notes

1. For links to the reports of the UN Secretary General, which include sections about the Member States and the measures taken by them, see http://www.un.org/terrorism/sg-reports.shtml (accessed 1 April 2008). States are also asked to submit reports periodically to the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee. For links to those reports, see http://www.un.org/sc/ctc/countryreports/reportA.shtml (accessed 8 April 2008).

2. For links to the CoE country profiles, see http://www.coe.int/T/E/Legal_Affairs/Legal_co-operation/Fight_against_terrorism/4_Theme_Files/Country_Profiles/ (accessed 1 April 2008).

3. For the UNODC's A classification of counter-terrorism measures, see UNODC (n.d.).

4. We have selected these countries because they vary on many relevant variables that might determine the nature of a country's counterterrorism policy, such as culture, duration of European Union membership, population size, experience with terrorism, and gross domestic product. This variation implies that we will be able to find a rich variety of counterterrorism policies.

5. For the definitions of the four strands as formulated by the European Union, which is also how we understand them here, see European Council (2005).

6. For the matrix with the measures and the research results for all countries, see http://www.transnationalterrorism.eu/publications.php/

7. The weights of the measures can be found in the left column of the Excel sheet containing the data set.

8. For a definition of the ‘broad approach’, see Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst (AIVD) (2007, p. 11).