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

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.