Playing it Safe? The Costs and Adverse Effects of Counterterrorism

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate international counterterrorism efforts to estimate their costs and potential adverse effects over time. An underlying presumption of the study is that flawed counterterrorism measures to some extent are counterproductive, and building on this idea a comparison is made between the distinguishing features of the ‘War on Terror ’ and an alternative model in the form of The UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. It is the argument of this paper that although it is difficult to speculate on future results, the Global Strategy constitutes a more promising approach for counterterrorism. The ‘War on Terror ’ contains measures that violate human rights and damage legitimacy, and as such risk a backlash and an increase in terrorist recruitments, while the Global Strategy focuses on building bottom-up and addressing the root causes of terrorism in a wider, more thoroughly planned, long-ter