ABSTRACT This paper investigates the extent to which the European Union is strategically engaging against terrorism. It builds on traditional scholarship on strategic thinking and elaborates an analytical framework to empirically assess strategic policy formulation at the supranational level in the case of terrorism. The framework revolves around three analytical categories: i) threat assessment; ii) objectives setting; and iii) policy measures. Through qualitative content analysis of text data, we show that, while objectives are clearly presented in the documents, the threat that the strategy is supposed to counter is unspecified. In addition to that, the formulation of concrete policy measures remains largely vague. Overall, the article adds to the growing academic debate on EU security governance and offers fresh empirical insights on strategic thinking in counterterrorism policy.

Strategic European counterterrorism? An empirical analysis

As approximately 5,500 European men, women, and children from 26 EU member states have travelled to Syria and Iraq since 2012, unease about “foreign terrorist fighters”—the term diffused in public and policy debates to designate anyone who came to reside in Syria and Iraq during the recent conflict—has grown increasingly salient. This chapter presents an alternative account of the official response to foreign fighters in the EU, situating it within the context of the European security agenda in the age of the war on terror. It first illustrates how the particular construction of the foreign fighter phenomenon in official accounts, as a novel and exceptional policy problem, is in fact a continuation of existing discourses on radicalisation in Europe. The chapter shows that the flagship policies and instruments put forward by the EU in their support of member states in tackling the “new” problem of foreign fighters are not as innovative as they are presented.

The European Union and “Foreign Terrorist Fighters” : Disciplining irreformable radicals?

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The European Union and “Foreign Terrorist Fighters” : Disciplining irreformable radicals?