The social determination of terrorist threat: Concepts of threat in Norwegian and E.U. anti-terror law

The project will catalogue and examine selected core legal, regulatory and policy documents of Norwegian and European Union security management. Following the principles and methods developed in the SORISK project, it will analyze how understandings of th reat vary as a function of varying social and cultural settings in which they are understood and implemented. It is based on the hypothesis that legal measures and regulation aimed at managing security threats depend for their meaning and force on the soc ial, cultural and political settings in which these notions of threat are formed. The Norwegian and European Union approaches to anti-terror legislation, regulation and policy are largely dissimilar for a variety of reasons. The Norwegian approach concern s the threat landscape relevant to the Norwegian territory and the civil, political and economic interests of Norwegian citizens. At the same time, the Norwegian and E.U anti-terror concerns overlap to some degree. They both feature measures designed to c ontribute to civil preparedness, national and international policing, national and international criminal, defence and surveillance/intelligence gathering. The various institutional arrangements of the Schengen Agreement address the threats to Norway as a subset of perceived threats to the European Union and the need for both national and overarching (transnational or European) competencies of the institutions involved. For this reason, the project will limit the research to five legal and regulatory are as: civil preparedness, policing, criminal law, national/European security, and intelligence gathering.