Counterterrorism strategies for the police: beyond the ‘control’ vs. ‘consent’ dilemma
The public police can adopt various approaches to address the problem of terrorism. This paper starts
with the classic distinction between the ‘control’ and the ‘consent’ approaches. It illustrates how each
of both approaches has its strong points, but also its potential perverse effects (increasing rather than
decreasing the risk of terrorism). The article observes a number of limitations of this twofold controlconsent typology and proposes to address these by expanding it to a fourfold typology inspired by grid-group cultural theory (originally developed by Mary Douglas). Like control and consent, the two
additional approaches not only have advantages but also potential perverse effects. In order to prevent
those perverse effects, counterterrorism policies should provide a well-balanced and context-sensitive
mix of the four approaches. It is argued that such a ‘clumsy’ mix will be more robust and less likely to
generate perverse effects than policies that coherently rely on less than four approaches.