Jihadi Terrorism and the Radicalisation Challenge in Europe

In early 2003 Egmont-Royal Institute for International Relations organised a major international conference in Brussels on international terrorism, under the heading ‘Root Causes of International Terrorism’. At that moment the very notion that there existed underlying forces that shaped the context and causes that led to 9/11 looked self-evident to academics, but was still very much a taboo concept in policy circles. Research within the Egmont-Royal Institute for International Relations has since revolved around two questions: first, how exactly the global environment boosts local and regional terrorism, and, second, how does this relate to the radicalisation process, which is occurring within Europe too.

Jihadi Terrorism and the Radicalisation Challenge in Europegrew out of a series of public conferences, seminars and informal brainstormings with many stakeholders from diverse horizons involved. It is articulated around these two themes. First, it establishes the state of jihadi terrorism today, almost two decades after it started in the early 1990s. Second, zooming in on Europe, it addresses the issue of radicalisation as the main root cause of potential jihadi terrorism in this part of the world.