Government anti-terror efforts feature prominently in the Norwegian security landscape. However, since 9/11, the national threat level in Norway has generally been considered low. Through which processes has a successful securitization of terrorist threat been achieved? The paper suggests that by repeating and circulating the imagination of a terrorist attack as a possible future, a constant state of alertness is legitimized. Hence, a culture of fear and a politics of suspicion become inscribed into everyday activities. This paper first traces the securitization of terrorist threat in the post-9/11 Norwegian security discourse by analyzing the annual public threat assessments presented by Norway’s secret service’s (PST). Two developments are noticeable: the adoption of a “European perspective” on terrorist threat, and the ongoing process of re-inscribing terrorist threat as inherently Islamist. Through the politics of suspicion, these processes represent a new way of governing through “othering” in the Norwegian context. The paper then explores how the PST embraces terrorist threat as risk by instantiating managerial practices of preparedness. This risk regime acknowledges the impossibility of ‘total security’: as strategies of preparedness allow cataclysmic imaginations of the future and relate to subjective states anxiety, they also necessitate security governance along the fine line between alertness and panic. In conclusion, the paper argues that the negligence of communicating security renders counterterrorism, just like terrorism, a domain of ‘terror’. (My paper is a critical assessment of intelligence activity in Norway. However, please feel free to move to any adequate panel in this section.)
