In Their Eyes: How European Security Services Look at Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism

Different databases, initiatives and reports aim to capture the state of the terrorist threat to a given country or region. It is less often, however, that these products focus on counter-terrorism nor do they feature the views of frontline practitioners on terrorism.

This ICCT report addresses the aforementioned gap. By combining practitioner perspectives gathered through an anonymous survey with detailed, structured narratives from more than 70 national security documents, the report captures both operational realities and strategic priorities of countering terrorism in the EU as of 2025. It draws upon newly gathered material and little known secondary sources from all of the EU Member States to offer an original insight into the secretive world of counter-terrorism. In short, it attempts to answer the following questions: how do counter-terrorism services assess the threat in Europe? What trends do they notice? What are their most pressing concerns? And how do they respond to the threat?

ICCT will return to theme of how “they” see the threat of terrorism in updates to this report which will be published annually. We will strive to not only cover the latest (counter)terrorism reporting from the security services in all of the EU Member States but will also continue polling the frontline practitioners to best reflect their perspective related to terrorism and counter-terrorism.