The European Union as a Global Counter-Terrorism Actor

Abstract

The 2023 Global Terrorism Index reveals that terrorist attacks and deaths from terrorism declined in 2022. However, several countries still face the challenge of terrorism, which has ripple effects on the global community. Additionally, the use of emerging technologies for financing and carrying out terrorism has complicated global efforts to effectively respond to terrorist acts (Institute for Economics and Peace 2023). Given the complexity of the terrorism landscape, more capable actors with innovative approaches to combat terrorism are required. The European Union as a Global Counter-Terrorism Actor, penned by three senior scholars in international security studies, aims to demonstrate the EU’s actorness in countering terrorism worldwide. The manuscript employs a combination of theory and empirical evidence to argue that the EU has grown as a global counterterrorism actor since the turn of the century, evolving from having almost no role in counterterrorism in 2001 to becoming a significant actor two decades later. The book adopts the ‘collective securitization’ framework, which was initially developed by James Sperling and Mark Webber in their 2019 research paper, to illustrate the collective securitization of terrorism in the EU following the events of 9/11 (Sperling and Webber 2019). The concept of collective securitization involves securitization within a regional arrangement, such as the EU, and its process consists of six stages: