A New Normal: Countering the Financing of Self-Activating Terrorism in Europe

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Numerous deadly terrorist attacks across Europe – from the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris and the Manchester Arena bombing of 2016 to the far-right firearms assault in Hanau, Germany in early 2020 – demonstrate that self-activating terrorism (sometimes referred to as lone actor or small cell terrorism) has become a major security concern for the continent. 

Much of the current ‘conventional wisdom’ around these kinds of actors assumes that terrorist financing and a counterterrorist financing (CTF) response are not relevant to this growing threat. Reports of attacks involving little to no preparation or financial resourcing have shaped a false perception that self-activator activity produces no usable financial intelligence. This has generated a high degree of unease among both CTF professionals in law enforcement, whose role it is to use legal investigatory powers to apprehend terrorists and would-be terrorists, and practitioners in the financial services sector, whose controls and instruments are designed to identify and report abuse of the financial system by terrorists planning attacks. The natural fear is that if the private sector cannot produce the kind of financial intelligence required, then law enforcement cannot do its job as effectively as it might.