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Government Responses to Asymmetric Threats: The State of the Literature on Counterterrorism from 2010 to 2023

Abstract:

This report provides a comprehensive review of academic studies on counterterrorism (CT), defined as “activities and operations taken to neutralize terrorists and their organizations and networks to render them incapable of using violence to instill fear and coerce governments or societies to achieve their goals.” It is part of a series of START’s reports on government responses to asymmetric threats. Previous reports provided insights on government responses to insurgent threats, the use of military lever of power in COIN, the use of information lever of power in COIN, the use of legal responses in COIN, and the adversaries’ reliance on information operations and governments’ responses to such operations. Like our past reports, this CT report highlights the methodology that guided our extraction of the literature on government responses to terrorism. We present the coding scheme created to classify a diverse body of scholarly literature. Next, we delve into key summary findings: from dependent and independent variables that have been analyzed by scholars to the methodologies that they used. We then discuss the geographic coverage of existing research, the major targets of state strategies, and the deployment of different levers of state power in CT.

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Publication Information

Full Citation:

Radziszewski, Elizabeth, and Polina Kharmats. 2024. "Government Responses to Asymmetric Threats: The State of the Literature on Counterterrorism from 2010 to 2023." College Park, MD: START (December).

START Author(s):