ABSTRACT
Today’s counter-terrorism in Western democracies appears much more wide-ranging than in the past, covering a broad range of actors and policies beyond the traditional security community. This evolution of counter-terrorism has generated a lot of comments and analyses. However, there has been remarkably little research seeking to conceptualise this evolution, lest to explain it. This introductory chapter sets the general context for the book’s argument, and it explains why Belgium is a good case study to understand the overall evolution of counter-terrorism in liberal democracies since 2001. It discusses the book’s methodology and structure.
