The science of fighting terrorism : the relation between terrorist actor type and counterterrorism effectiveness

Abstract

While terrorism is one of the most prominent security threats in the Western world, there is surprisingly little research that adresses the effectiveness of the instruments that are used to fight it. In this doctoral dissertation national and international security expert Teun van Dongen will fill this gap by demonstrating that there is a link between the nature of a terrorist threat and the effects of the measures that are applied against it. He will outline a new way to measure coun-terterrorism effectiveness and will apply it to the counterterrorist cam_paigns against the Provisional IRA, ETA, the Weather Underground, the RAF and the jihadist movements in the UK and the Netherlands. The results show that the effect of counterterrorism measures depends to a considerable degree on the way terrorist organisations or movements are organised and on the way they interact with the population