On 12 - 13 December 2010, ICCT held its International Launch Conference entitled ‘Ten Years after 9/11: Evaluating a Decade of Intensified Counter-Terrorism’. Over 200 high-level international experts from various governments, academic institutions and NGOs gathered to discuss the status of counter-terrorism as the year 2011 draws near, in which it will be 10 years since those devastating attacks on the United States.
The conference commenced with a dinner in the historic former Town Hall of The Hague on December 12. Dan Gardner, journalist and author of ‘Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear’, held a keynote on (counter-)terrorism, fear and risk perception. He argued that policymakers “should attack the terror, not just the terrorist”.
On Monday 13 December, distinguished member of the ICCT Board of Advisors and former NATO Secretary General Professor Jaap de Hoop Scheffer formally opened the conference, welcoming the guest in “The Hague, City of Peace, Justice and Security and also, as of today, the city of Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism”. This was followed by introductory remarks on the conference theme and proceedings by ICCT director Peter Knoope.
Subsequently, two keynote speakers, Michael E. Rolince (former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Washington Field Office Counterterrorism Division) and Imtiaz Gul (Journalist and Director Center for Research and Security Studies, Islamabad), gave the audience a bird’s eye overview of a decade of counter-terrorism from two very different geographical and institutional perspectives. During the subsequent plenary panel discussion, Prof. Dr. Martha Crenshaw (Stanford University) and Richard Barrett (Coordinator UN Al-Qaida / Taliban Monitoring Team) commented on the earlier presentations and presented their own analyses of implemented counter-terrorism policies and measures over the last ten years.
The afternoon segment of the conference consisted of four Panel Workshops, each looking into the progress that has been made over the last decade in a specific area of counter-terrorism. At the end of the workshop sessions, each Chair reported back various policy recommendations and areas of future research in relation to the workshop’s theme.
Click here for a detailed report on the conference proceedings, including summaries of the various presentations by the speakers and panellists and an overview of the policy and research recommendations that resulted from the panel workshops.
See the press release here.
