Policy Responses to Radicalization of the Jihadist Network

The persistence of terrorist attacks or incidents from the beginning of the century till now in Europe suggest that jihadi-inspired terrorism may be on its way to become a structural phenomenon of European societies; especially since in many cases the terrorists have been born and radicalized within Europe. This is a problem that affects society at an international level, but given the extent and nature of this paper, I will limit myself to analyze the European context. One of the main problem faced by States when it comes to combating terrorist activities is the radicalization of both immigrants and descendants of immigrants (known as second and third generation immigrants) and the way that the integration of such generations may help fighting back Islamic radicalization. These facts suggest that inspired jihadist terrorism is poised to become a structural phenomenon of European societies; especially since in many cases the terrorists were radicalized in Europe, as happened for example with the suicide of the London bombings, the murderer of Theo van Gogh or several of those involved in the attacks of 11-M. This has meant that both the European Union as an institution and the member states have focused a large part of their security policies on countering the phenomenon of jihadist radicalisation. In spite of all these efforts, the frequent Jihadist networks dismantlement by European security forces, the detection of terrorist attacks plan, and the consummation of some of this plans prove that the European efforts in order to stop radicalization, have not been able to stop the radicalization dynamic on EU (Europol, 2017). A number of academic studies agree on the idea that European Union has not been able to stop the radicalization process in the Jihadist Network in the last decades (Barlett, 2012). Even though the European Union has proposed a common guideline action plan in this regard, there does not exit a unified counter radicalization policy in Europe. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze the core elements of strategies and programs for the prevention of this phenomenon proposed by the European Commission and compare it with the counter radicalization strategies of two relevant European States: United Kingdom and Netherland. By doing so, I will try to address the question of how different the several European policies are from each other and analyze to what extend this variability within the several European strategies is responsible of this apparent European policy making failure. It is my goal to analyze the effectiveness of these policies and identify the limitations of European counter radicalization policies.