Over the past two and a half decades, governments have responded to jihadist terrorism with a mix of military force, political and legal measures, preventive efforts, and international cooperation. But the balance of these tools has proved strategically incomplete. Though these efforts have degraded al-Qaida and the “Islamic State” core organizations and prevented another “9/11”-scale attack in the West, jihadism has evolved into a more diffuse, adaptive movement that remains difficult to eliminate or decisively defeat even where it has been contained. The persistence of the problem reflects not only the adaptability of jihadist networks, but also unresolved tensions between security and governance, coercion and legitimacy, and a growing misalignment between counterterrorism tools and the political, social, and technological dynamics that sustain the movement.
What distinguished the early post-“9/11” period was the unprecedented scale and framing of the response. Rather than treat the attacks as a criminal act or a discrete security threat, the United States and its allies launched a “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), a wide-ranging, worldwide campaign against jihadist networks and the states that harbored them. The response was as unprecedented institutionally as it was rhetorically: on September 12, 2001, NATO invoked Article 5, its collective-defense guarantee, for the first and only time in its history (North Atlantic Treaty Organization 2001). Weeks later, a US-led coalition launched the invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban and deny al-Qaida its sanctuary. But in 2003 the U.S. extended the GWOT to justify the invasion of Iraq, a war actually worsened the terrorist threat and set in motion broader changes in the region that still reverberate (Jones 2012; Kilcullen 2016). The GWOT framing mattered because it shaped everything that followed: military force, legal and institutional reform, preventive programs, and international cooperation were all initially organized around the premise of a war to be won rather than a persistent risk to be managed. The sections that follow trace these instruments in turn — and why, nearly twenty-five years on, they have proved strategically incomplete.
Military Responses and their Limits
Most states confronting a jihadist threat have incorporated a military dimension into their counterterrorism strategies, but the form, intensity, and purpose of that force differed across contexts. In the early post-“9/11” period, the United States and its allies launched large-scale campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, then gradually shifted toward a “lighter footprint” model centered on intelligence, special operations, targeted airstrikes, and local partner forces rather than large-scale counterinsurgency deployments (Jones 2012; Kaldor 2012). This approach has often proved tactically effective in degrading organizations and disrupting plots, yet by externalizing the fight into fragile states, it has also contributed to protracted conflict, state fragility, and civilian casualties that jihadist actors exploited to become entrenched, to recruit, and to spread propaganda.
In non-Western countries confronting a domestic jihadist threat, military operations have taken the form of internal counterinsurgency and security campaigns that rely on repression and coercion (Human Rights Watch 2017). In these instances, the response is led by these states’ own militaries and security services rather than by foreign forces: Egypt’s campaign against the “Islamic State” affiliate in North Sinai, for instance, has paired operations against the insurgents with mass home demolitions, forced evictions, and killings that Human Rights Watch has documented as serious abuses and likely war crimes (Human Rights Watch 2019). States have deployed large-scale ground offensives, aerial bombardments, and paramilitary or irregular forces to clear areas and assert control, frequently with limited regard for civilians (International Committee of the Red Cross 2018).
These operations have sometimes achieved short-term tactical success, but abuses, indiscriminate violence, and widespread displacement have generated grievances that fuel local receptivity to jihadist groups or facilitate their relocation into areas with weaker governance and security forces, displacing rather than resolving the threat (Gurr 2011; Moghadam 2017). For example, the Lake Chad Basin illustrates the pattern. Successive Nigerian and regional offensives have repeatedly dislodged Boko Haram and its “Islamic State” splinter, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), only for fighters to regroup across the porous borders of Niger, Chad, and Cameroon (International Crisis Group 2016).
Across both Western and non-Western contexts, progress has too often been measured by airstrikes, arrests, or militants killed. At the same time, insufficient attention is paid to whether these operations are followed by stronger governance, reduced grievances, and more resilient social compacts (Kilcullen, 2016; United States Institute of Peace 2019; Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development 2020).
This coercive emphasis of the early GWOT also carried profound legal and moral costs that continue to shadow counterterrorism today. For example, in the years after “9/11”, the United States operated a network of secret CIA detention sites, including several located on European soil, with the complicity of host governments, where detainees were held incommunicado and subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” that a later US Senate inquiry and human rights investigators documented as torture (Open Society Justice Initiative 2013; United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence 2014). The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in Iraq became an emblem of counterterrorism excesses, and the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, opened in 2002 to hold terrorism suspects beyond the reach of ordinary legal protections, proved difficult to close — as did securing successful convictions in the associated military commissions (Human Rights Watch 2011; Human Rights First 2018). Beyond the harm to those detained, these practices eroded the legitimacy on which durable counterterrorism depends, supplied jihadist propagandists with lasting recruitment narratives, and strained the alliances and legal norms that effective international cooperation required.
Legal, Institutional, and Political Measures
Beyond military operations, Western states have expanded domestic legal and institutional frameworks to address jihadist terrorism (Saul 2006; Heymann 2018). Many have criminalized a broad range of terrorism-related activities—financing, foreign fighter travel, incitement, and material support for designated groups—while enhancing law enforcement and intelligence capabilities (United Nations Security Council 2001; Financial Action Task Force 2012; United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism 2018). In the wake of the Islamic State’s territorial expansion, for example, United Nations Security Council Resolution 2178 (2014) required states to make it a criminal offense for their nationals to travel abroad to join a terrorist group. This prompting a wave of national foreign fighter offences and prosecutions of returnees across Europe, while the United States has relied on its material-support statute (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) to prosecute those who provide funds, training, or personnel to designated terrorist organizations (United Nations Security Council 2014).
Over time, however, most Western governments recognized that security-focused measures alone could not address the drivers of radicalization. This led to growing investment in preventive strategies aimed at deradicalization, community resilience, and counter-narratives. But the outcomes were often uneven and hard-to-measure. Rigorous evaluations remain scarce, and effectiveness has varied widely both across national contexts and across the specific populations these programs target (Bhui et al. 2014; Romaniuk 2015).
In non-Western states, counterterrorism often became intertwined or conflated with regime survival and internal political control (Lia 2008; Gause 2014). Some governments used counterterrorism laws to suppress not only violent groups but also political opposition, dissent, and minority communities, relying on broadly worded statutes that criminalize protest, restrict freedom of expression, and allow for prolonged detention without trial (Human Rights Watch 2012; United Nations Special Rapporteur on Counter-terrorism and Human Rights 2018). For example, Egypt’s 2015 counterterrorism law adopted sweeping definitions that authorities have used to prosecute journalists, protesters, and opposition figures (Human Rights Watch 2015). In addition, China has invoked “counter-extremism” to justify the mass detention and “re-education” of Uyghurs in Xinjiang (International Federation for Human Rights 2016). Admittedly, several states combined coercion with other tools in ways that have contained—though not eliminated—the threat. In some cases, governments have also invested in youth employment programs, selective political liberalization, and socio-economic initiatives, but these have often been partial, inconsistent, and relatively underfunded (United Nations Development Programme 2016; World Bank 2018).
International Cooperation and its Erosion
International cooperation began almost immediately and at the level of binding obligation. NATO invoked Article 5 the day after the attacks, and on 28 September 2001 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1373, which obliged all states to criminalize terrorism financing and support, strengthen domestic law, and enhance information sharing (United Nations Security Council 2001; Rosand 2003). The subsequent UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy consolidated this framework (United Nations General Assembly 2006), while the Financial Action Task Force used peer review and listing mechanisms to pressure states to close financial channels (Financial Action Task Force 2012; Wittig 2011). Additional multilateral forums — including the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism and the Global Counter-Terrorism Forum — promoted capacity building, criminal justice reforms, and civilian-focused approaches to Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), helping to disseminate norms and support stabilization in fragile states (United Nations General Assembly 2018; Global Counterterrorism Forum 2014). In practice, these forums produced not only declarations but concrete instruments and institutions, among them the Global Counterterrorism Forum’s good practices on community engagement and community-oriented policing, the Hedayah international center for countering violent extremism in Abu Dhabi, and the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund (GCERF), which channels grants to community-level prevention programs in fragile states.
More military coordination followed, at an unprecedent scale. The Global Coalition against Daesh, formed in September 2014 under US leadership and eventually encompassing more than eighty states and international organizations, combined Western airpower, intelligence sharing, special operations support, and capacity building with local partners in Iraq and Syria (Global Coalition against Daesh 2014; International Crisis Group 2016). It played a central role in dismantling the group’s self-declared territorial “caliphate,” arguably the high-water mark of multilateral military coordination against the transnational jihadist threat.
However, cooperation has often been fragmented and uneven. Many non-Western states preferred bilateral security partnerships that deliver military aid, training, and intelligence without comparable incentives to undertake governance reforms, and regional organizations such as the African Union, ECOWAS, ASEAN, and the GCC have struggled with sovereignty concerns, weak institutions, and mistrust that constrained integrated cross-border responses (Bures 2011). In 2026, this landscape has further deteriorated, as geopolitical competition, divergent national interests, and shifting priorities weaken coordinated action, reduce intelligence sharing, and make it difficult to imagine replicating an initiative on the scale of the Global Coalition against Daesh (Levitt 2024; Bacon 2024).
Counterterrorism cooperation has grown more transactional, short term, and politicized, allowing the jihadist movement to face a less coherent and less coordinated international response (Krahmann 2010; Crenshaw/LaFree 2017). The starkest recent illustration came in January 2026, when the United States, which had helped found the Global Counterterrorism Forum in 2011, announced its withdrawal from the Forum, the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund, and the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law, alongside dozens of other international bodies (The White House 2026; Holmer 2026). Because Washington had been a principal architect and funder of much of this prevention-oriented architecture, its exit did more than strain budgets. It signaled that even the state that built the system no longer regarded it as indispensable, licensing others to disengage and shifting the burden of sustaining multilateral counterterrorism cooperation onto a narrower set of actors, principally the European Union (Holmer 2026).
Why Jihadism Persists
Overall, jihadism remains a persistent challenge nearly twenty-five years after “9/11”. It has evolved into a diffuse movement of ideologies, grievances, and networks that can mobilize violence where there are conditions of instability, weak governance, exclusion, or repression, with al-Qaida and “Islamic State” affiliates flourishing, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, by exploiting local conflicts and governance failures (International Crisis Group 2016; Shapiro 2013). Western states have prevented another large-scale catastrophic attack on their own soil through layered security, intelligence sharing, and border controls. They have also significantly degraded the core of al-Qaida and the “Islamic State”. But neither organization has been eradicated and their ideas continue to attract adherents while their networks continue to enact violence (Neumann 2016; Byman 2015).
A central reason for this persistence is that many counterterrorism strategies are optimized for tactical disruption rather than for transforming the underlying drivers of radicalization (Schmid 2013; Dalgaard-Nielsen 2010). Heavy-handed military and security operations may displace jihadist groups or degrade their capabilities, but this approach often fails to rebuild legitimacy, governance, or economic opportunity in recaptured areas, leaving communities vulnerable to re-infiltration and recruitment (Kalyvas 2006; Petraeus/Amos 2007). In many contexts, coercive strategies generate precisely the grievances—civilian casualties, youth alienation, and social marginalization—that jihadist organizations exploit, while prevention programs remain under-resourced, politically contested, and poorly evaluated relative to the scale of demographic and technological change (United Nations Development Programme 2017; Feddes/Gallucci 2015). As a result, states have become adept at dismantling specific terrorist organizations, but less successful at shrinking the recruitment pools and social ecosystems from which those organizations draw (Vidino/Brandon 2012).
No country has “overcome” jihadism in the sense of eradicating the ideology, sympathizers, and potential for violence (Hoffman 2017; Cronin 2015). In a few cases—such as Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Iceland—domestic jihadist terrorism has been extremely limited, involving primarily isolated incidents, plots, or hostage-taking abroad, but even these states recognize the continuing risk of foreign-linked or online-inspired attacks (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2022; Kim 2022; New Zealand Security Intelligence Service 2025).
More consequentially, several states have achieved a form of containment through combinations of security, political, and societal measures. Indonesia has relied on effective policing, intelligence, and coherent deradicalization and rehabilitation programs. Morocco has emphasized intelligence services, proactive monitoring of religious spaces, and a state-controlled religious establishment. Jordan has relied on pervasive intelligence penetration by its General Intelligence Directorate to monitor and disrupt militant networks, paired with the strategic co-optation of tribal leaders, the official religious establishment, and quietist Salafi currents, binding potential opponents to the monarchy through patronage and selective inclusion rather than confrontation. Saudi Arabia has used repression, intelligence, amnesties, and religious rehabilitation. Finally, Algeria has combined military force, negotiated amnesties, and efforts to delegitimize jihadist ideology (International Crisis Group 2004; Rabasa et al. 2010; Boukhars 2014; Hegghammer 2010; Wagemakers 2016; Boucek 2008).
These are not the only models. Singapore, a non-Muslim-majority state, has managed detained and returning militants through a structured religious-rehabilitation program run with community clerics (Rabasa et al. 2010). Many Western states have leaned less on coercion and more on multi-agency prevention and deradicalization at home, such as the United Kingdom’s Prevent strategy, including its Channel referral programme, and Germany’s exit and counseling networks among the most developed, though these too have been criticized for stigmatizing Muslim communities and blurring safeguarding into surveillance (Vidino/Brandon 2012; Köhler 2019).
The “success” label sits uneasily, however. Many of the measures at work — pervasive surveillance, the monitoring of religious life, mass or prolonged detention, and tight state control of religious institutions — are precisely the practices that human rights organizations condemn as discriminatory and alienating, and several of the states involved are among their regions more authoritarian. The more defensible lesson is not that these are unqualified success stories but that states can suppress and manage jihadism, often at real cost to rights and legitimacy, while rarely resolving the underlying social, political, and regional conditions that allow the threat to re-emerge — frequently displacing rather than reducing it (Gurr 2011; Neumann 2013).
What Future Counterterrorism Should Look Like
Looking ahead, the international community will be less well positioned to counter jihadism effectively than it was during earlier phases of the GWOT, because they are misaligned with the movement’s evolving dynamics and embedded in an international environment marked by rivalry and unpredictability (Levitt 2024; Shtuni 2025). The jihadist movement now operates through fluid networks, regionally-embedded affiliates, lone actors, and online connections rather than hierarchical structures centered on al-Qaida core or the “Islamic State”, which demands more context-specific approaches that focus on how recruitment, funding, and governance function in local and digital settings (Mendelsohn 2016; Margolin/Zelin 2023; Kruger/Shapiro 2017). Ideology plays a role, but jihadism cannot be reduced to ideology. Structural factors such as social isolation, economic marginalization, trauma, and identity dilemmas shape pathways into violence, and extremist mobilization has become more “ideologically fluid” (Kundnani 2012; Köhler 2019).
In this environment, effective counterterrorism in 2026 should integrate tactical disruption with strategic political engagement, social inclusion, and youth-centered resilience programming (United Nations Development Programme 2017; Schmid 2013). Youth populations are especially important. Rapidly changing technology, sociopolitical instability, and a proliferation of online spaces have exacerbated vulnerabilities for teenagers and young adults, while many states still lack comprehensive, non-securitized systems to identify and support at-risk youth before radicalization occurs (Radicalisation Awareness Network 2019). Rather than treating vulnerable young people primarily as security risks, prevention efforts should invest in tailored, locally-owned initiatives that combine economic and political opportunities with credible counter-messaging and avenues for constructive civic engagement (Bjørgo 2005; Schmid 2005; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 2017).
A central front in this struggle is the digital domain, where extremist messaging spreads across encrypted platforms, social media ecosystems, and gaming spaces that elude traditional law enforcement and content-moderation tools (Conway 2017). Jihadist networks can operate across multiple platforms, exploit private messaging and unmoderated channels, and experiment with new technologies such as artificial intelligence, while efforts to understand and counter these dynamics lagged behind (Weimann 2015; United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute/United Nations Counter-Terrorism Centre 2020). Addressing this challenge requires a whole-of-society response that brings together public authorities, technology companies, civil society, and educators around shared goals while managing harmful content in ways consistent with human rights, promoting credible counter-narratives, and strengthening digital literacy and resilience, especially among youth (OSCE Transnational Threats Department 2015; Macdonald et al. 2019).
Finally, political and institutional constraints on prevention must be addressed if counterterrorism is to become more effective and sustainable (Charkawi 2024). Many prevention programs lack rigorous impact assessments, reliable metrics, and sustained funding, which undermines institutional learning, accountability, and long-term investment in approaches that tackle structural drivers rather than only proximate risk factors (Feddes/Gallucci 2015). Conceptual ambiguity and uneven evaluation frameworks have made it difficult to demonstrate effectiveness or adapt to emerging threats, while declining political will and funding have produced stagnation and politicization (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2018; McKenzie 2016). Reversing this trend requires treating prevention as a core pillar of counterterrorism—equal to security measures—backed by dedicated resources, professional staffing, and independent evaluation, and embedding it within international cooperation that emphasizes local ownership and human rights alongside security imperatives (United Nations General Assembly 2018; OSCE Secretariat 2020).
In sum, post-“9/11” counterterrorism has been operationally successful in degrading specific organizations and preventing the worst catastrophic attacks in the West, but it has been, and is likely to remain, strategically incomplete (Hoffman 2017; Neumann 2016; Clarke/Broekaert 2025; Doxsee et al. 2024; Institute for Economics and Peace 2025). To respond effectively to the jihadist threat, governments must move beyond a predominantly coercive paradigm and adopt an integrated approach that links security operations to governance reform, social inclusion, youth resilience, adaptive digital strategies, and revitalized but politically realistic forms of international cooperation (Schmid 2013; Shtuni 2025).