Curbing terrorism: Going for an olive branch on a gnarly tree
How to end terrorism? Not to contain it, nor to wear it down, nor to thwart it with counter-terrorism. End it. Put it to sleep. Disappear it.
This is not a question taken lightly anywhere in the world. In 2024, according to the Institute for Economics & Peace's Global Terrorism Index, 98 of the world's 195 countries were contending with some form of terrorism. The question is especially crucial for India, because, with a score of 6.41 out of 10, India was at 14th place on the GTI list. It is even more critical for Pakistan, which occupied the 2nd place with a score of 8.374.
State counter-terrorism won't cut it, because, by definition, it partakes substantially of the characteristics of terrorism itself: counter-violence, often on populations vulnerabilised by the presence of unrepresentative terrorists in their midst; sanctions that immoderately impact these defenceless soak-pits; unmanaged—and often unmanageable—societal disruption caused by the crossfire between terrorism and counter-terrorism.
Clearly, both terrorism and counter-terrorism feed the wolf in an endless spiral of escalation. This happens nearly everywhere in the world. Nearly: but not in some advanced democracies such as in Scandinavia—where multifaceted terrorism does happen, but rarely enough to not attract statal blowback, which is constrained by embedded policies of restraint.
Terrorist attacks in northern Europe are so infrequent that they stand out in public memory. The worst one happened a decade-and-a-half ago, when the rightwing extremist Anders Breivik killed 77 people in Norway in an anti-government rage. In 2015, two people were killed by an Islamist in Denmark. In 2017, an Islamic terrorist killed five people in Sweden. In 2019, a Norwegian rightwinger and a Finn killed one person each. In 2022, two people were killed in a homophobic mass shooting in Norway. Despite these attacks, the Nordics remain the least impacted by terrorism. Only one Scandinavian country features in the Statista list of 10 worst terrorist attacks in terms of fatalities in Europe from 1980 to 2023: Norway. The only Scandinavian country to make it in the GTI's top 50 states was Sweden—at the very last spot, with a score of 1.84.
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