THE COOPERATION DILEMMA IN COUNTERTERRORISM OPERATIONS

Which factors drive counterterrorism (CT) cooperation? Academic research has studied terrorism and counterterrorism since the seventies, yet such a question has remained unanswered. As terrorism was mainly considered an internal problem, scholars focused on domestic responses, while international strategies have received meagre attention. This work aims at answering this question, merging CT and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) literature. Two are the factors upon which the merger is built: threat perception prompted by terrorism and the domestic environment. By importing and combining elements from these fields, it is possible to reach a better explanation. To conduct the inquiry, I adopted a mixed method design approach. At first, I conducted a quantitative study on two newly collected datasets using panel data analysis. These datasets include CT bilateral agreements signed by European countries between 2002 - 2017. Then, I examined two case studies to test the robustness of the results of the first analysis. These cases have been analysed separately through process-tracing. The findings confirm the theoretical framework. Emotions are pivotal: both analyses show that when the perception of the threat is low, it is improbable that two countries sign a CT cooperation agreement. Similarly, the domestic environment does matter. Ideology of governments is crucial, corroborating what previous works underlined: parties in the centre of the left-right scale are more inclined to cooperate. On the other hand, findings also show that threat perception impacts cabinets at the extreme of the left-right scale, pushing them to cooperate with other nations. This work adds three new contributions to the field. First is the role of emotions in shaping international relations. Although scholars have argued the importance of this factor for domestic CT policies, studies on international CT cooperation have not fully considered this aspect. Furthermore, unlike previous works, this study compares the effect of threat perception with the effect of the actual impact of terrorism, showing that the former is much more important than the latter. The second contribution is the analysis of the role played by domestic structure on CT cooperation. Although in recent years many FPA and IR scholars have been examining the role of this factor, in CT studies such a "domestic turn" has yet to come. This thesis tries to open the field to a political perspective that can help reach a complete explanation of international CT cooperation. Lastly, this thesis fosters the study of counterterrorism in Europe. Scholars have utterly studied EU counterterrorism and the domestic policies adopted by its members. By contrast, they devoted less attention to the analysis of bilateral cooperation between EU members, even if it still is a fundamental part of their strategy against terrorism. Therefore, not only this work sheds light on an issue that has been poorly debated, but it does so by looking at a case - bilateral cooperation between EU members - that literature on EU CT has little considered so far.