Remembering Utøya, 10 Years Later: Enduring Lessons for Counter-Terrorism

Abstract

July 22, 2021 marks the 10-year anniversary of Anders Behring Breivik’s lone actor attack on Oslo. The intervening decade has seen a wave of far-right violence targeting Western cities, many inspired by the Norwegian terrorist. The anniversary accordingly offers an important opportunity to revisit counter-terrorism lessons learned, and to assess whether they have been sufficiently implemented in strategies preventing political violence. This Policy Brief finds that lessons learned from events transpiring before, during, and after the attack have been insufficiently considered, and that new counter-terrorism strategies targeting far-right violence should re-assess failures that permitted the attack and incorporate responses to those weaknesses.