Security After the Unthinkable

The astonishing lone-wolf terrorist attack on Oslo and Utøya on 22 July 2011 shook the Norwegian security establishment to its core. But it also rattled the cultural, social and spiritual self-understanding of 'the safest country in the world'. This book builds a theoretical perspective for explaining what security remains after the security event. It studies in detail the evolution of security thinking before, during and after the 2011 terrorist attack in Norway, tracking the political discourse and the institutional reactions in order to form a theory of 'terror and disenchantment'. By tracing the social and political evolution in security thought and policy after the attacks, Security after the unthinkable shows that the multiple hindsight rationalisations of the attack, coupled with a bureaucratisation of the response, collapsed this myth - and with it the most long-standing source of Norwegian security. The volume develops a general theory of security that contributes to ongoing debates on non-military security, asymmetric warfare, ontological security and human security. It revisits the nature of terrorism, the sense of its practice and re-conceptualises the way practice of counter - and anti-terrorism are embedded in social, cultural and national consciousness.