ROMANIA'S VULNERABILITIES REGARDING RADICALIZATION AND OBSERVED TRENDS OF THE PHENOMENON.

The terminology of radicalization started to be acknowledged after the 9/11 events, a turning point for international security that marked the beginning of the War on Terror. Practitioners, policymakers, and researchers in the field of countering terrorism focused more and more on the concept of radicalization as a precursor of terrorism, in the sense of being the starting point for preventing the terrorism phenomenon. In this regard, the past terrorist attacks in Europe awakened awareness about the necessity of identifying the incipient signs of radicalization as an early warning instrument for avoiding the probability of manifesting a terrorist attack. Even though the Global Terrorism Index has evaluated Romania as one of the countries with the lowest risks of terrorism at the international level for the past decade, it is still important to improve the mechanisms for preventing radicalization. In this consideration, Romania could be indirectly impacted by factors related to the global or regional dynamics of terrorism. This paper aims to develop a pattern of radicalization vulnerabilities and observed trends in Romania. In this idea, the analysis of the past terrorist attempts in Romania emphasizes important details in terms of trends of radicalization. Furthermore, the analysis of the specific radicalization features in Romania is focused on identifying the vulnerabilities, following the case study conclusions on radicalized Romanian citizens and radicalized foreigners that were expelled by the national courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]