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Terrorism has emerged as one of the greatest challenges to international security in the 21st Century. This situation compelled us to reconsider to what extent organizations could exploit the means that the current advancements provide us with, and how they could trigger ongoing instabilities. Therefore, this report intends to shed light on Emerging Threats in Terrorism by answering the following question:

“What are the emerging threats in terms of terrorism in the future?”

The project team implemented the Delphi Technique that enables researchers to explore what experts foresee concerning the emerging threats in terrorism. In order to conduct this research, the project team identified 30 different experts from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East who are specialized in various disciplines in order to benefit from their experience and knowledge. The areas of expertise of the respondents cover Biosecurity and Health Security, Changing World Order, Critical Infrastructure, Cyber Security, Economic Security and Development, Emerging Technologies, Energy Security, Environmental Security, Hybrid Warfare, Intelligence, Maritime Security, Migration, National Security, Nuclear Threats (Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear (CBRN)), Social Media, Terrorism, Radicalization and Terrorist Financing.

Even though our main focus is on the responses of the experts participating in the Delphi Technique Survey, we benefited from the younger people’s evaluation of current and future threats. It was quite fruitful to compare the priorities and perceptions of the younger generation. We can conclude that their concerns are more about what they have been experiencing, instead of what they expect to be witnessing. For instance, they included epidemics and pandemics, online radicalization, societal problems, terrorist organizations’ occupation of legitimate authorities, and transportation, as being among both current and future terrorist threats.

The threats are highly uncertain, as we observe baby steps in the evolution of the international order. Among others, the first signals of mass migration attempts, demographics, increasing population, and climate change are exponentially growing issues. We are fast approaching a time when these potential problems will become more volatile, and the first half of this century might be the time humankind will not be able to avoid tackling them. Given the intertwined and cyclical nature of these problems, we should start dealing with each without further delay. We gathered our experts’ forecasts about which sectors of security will pose the greatest challenges. In this sense, we can categorize the emerging terrorist threats identified by our experts as:

• New and Emerging Technology-Related Threats

• Innovative New Threats Against Conventional Sectors

• Accumulation of Classical Terrorist Threats

• Innovative New Threats against Non-Conventional Sectors

As can be comprehended from these categorizations, emerging threats push legitimate authorities and traditional counter-terrorism approaches to evolve in order to respond to these threats. Despite this, the threats are not new, but transformative. Therefore, there is no doubt that the scope, perspective, and implementation of countering these threats should also be transformative.