How did the North European states react to the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001? Michael Karlsson argues that 9/11 led to a considerable pressure to strengthen rules and practices for counterterrorism and security, but that this pressure was mediated by several other conditions. The reforms were also affected by, among other things, how the threat of global terrorism was perceived, pressure from international institutions such as the UN, EU, and NATO, the domestic political context, and pre-existing rules and practices. His analysis uses the new institutionalism framework, tested through case studies of Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The book offers a unique lens on the study of counterterrorism from a new theoretical and regional perspective.

Lithuania’s formation of a counter-terrorism institution after 9/11 sheds new light on three premises often associated with the study of institutional formation. First, while the distinction between the creation phase and the operation phase is logical, the appearance of extra-institutional guidance suggests that established institutions within other domains (e.g. military security) can temporarily fill an institutional vacuum (counter-terrorism). Second, the dynamic between agency and structure is readily seen, but in this case it was quite clear that agency was strongly dependent upon changes in some of the structural contexts (threat of terrorism, international institutions, age of the security state). Third, the role of sequencing and timing turned out to be more important than expected. There was a strong temporal order between the sequences of the formation phase and a significant spillover from two contemporary security processes (preparations for NATO membership, reforms of the security state).