Assessing The European Terrorist Threat Landscape

(The Soufan Center) Smaller-scale and often lone-actor incidents increasingly dominate the European terrorist threat landscape, notably after the October 7 Hamas attacks and the subsequent war in Gaza. Online radicalization is increasingly common among terrorist attacks in Europe, often operating on a compressed timeline of a couple of weeks, as opposed to the traditional months- or years-long radicalization process. State-linked operations — primarily by Iran and Russia and often termed “hybrid threats” — have at times amounted to acts of terrorism and have simultaneously helped to foster the conditions from which violence emerges by attempting to disrupt societal cohesion. The blurred ideological — as well as an increase in nihilistic and memetic — motives among perpetrators increasingly characterize terrorist plots in Europe. – Assessing The European Terrorist Threat Landscape – The Soufan Center