Responding to foreign fighters: An overview of the main challenges

The foreign fighters phenomenon is currently omnipresent on the agenda of police officers, prosecutors, de-radicalisation experts, researchers, policy makers, municipalities, governments, international organisations and think tanks. The problem is too complex and multi-faceted to analyse in just a few pages. Therefore, the following article, based on a speech presented to the Council of Europe’s Committee on Political Affairs and Democracy on 16 March 2015, should merely be seen as a quick and elementary snap-shot, providing some basic features of the current problem.