When Violence Stops Fitting the Label

When investigators from nine European countries targeted a violent online network called The Com this summer, they were not dealing with an organisation held together by a single manifesto. Its activities ranged from cybercrime and sexual extortion to attacks carried out offline, with some of its members drawing on jihadist or right-wing extremist ideas. Europol reports that the more extreme the content someone produced or extorted, the more status they could gain within the network. For some members, the question was not only about what they believed, but also what they were willing to do to be recognised.

Europol announced the action against The Com eleven days after publishing its EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2026. Jihadist terrorism remained the largest category in its figures, accounting for 24 of the EU’s 45 reported attacks (including failed and foiled attempts) and 347 of its 486 terrorism-related arrests in 2025. Yet the report also describes actors who draw on conflicting extremist ideas without committing to a coherent set of beliefs. Those ideas can become entangled with personal grievances, particularly in online communities where violence is rewarded with recognition.

Here lies Europe’s category problem. Labels such as jihadist or right-wing terrorism help authorities compare cases and identify patterns across borders. They become less useful when asked to explain the whole story: knowing which ideas someone borrowed still leaves the question of why they acted on them. Europe has good reasons to keep its categories, but prevention cannot stop at finding the right label. Prevention needs a second lens alongside those labels: an examination of how someone moves towards violence, including how personal grievances develop within online communities that reward harmful acts.

The Category Problem

Europol’s categories serve a practical purpose. They organise information submitted by national authorities into a shared account of terrorism across the EU. The 2026 report distinguishes jihadist, right-wing, left-wing and anarchist, and ethno-nationalist and separatist terrorism. These groupings make it easier to follow developments over time, but Europol itself makes an important qualification: its ideological categories carry no legal or formal status. In practice, these labels organise the cases that national authorities report as terrorism; they do not provide a separate legal test for deciding whether an offence qualifies. A case can therefore meet the legal definition of terrorism even when its ideological classification remains uncertain.

That distinction matters because “extremist” is not simply another word for “terrorist”. Article 3 of the EU’s 2017 counter-terrorism directive sets out specific intentional offences which, by their nature or context, may seriously damage a country or international organisation. To qualify as terrorist offences under that article, they must also pursue a particular aim: seriously intimidating a population, improperly forcing a government or international organisation to act or refrain from acting, or seriously destabilising or destroying a country’s or organisation’s fundamental structures. The brutality of an attack alone does not settle the question.

Nor does Article 3 require the perpetrator to possess a coherent ideology. Someone with contradictory beliefs could still act with one of those aims. Conversely, possessing extremist propaganda does not itself establish that a violent attack served a terrorist purpose. Research on online radicalisation also cautions against treating exposure to propaganda as a straightforward route to violence: its effects depend partly on the individual and their wider circumstances. Investigators must establish what the person intended to achieve, rather than infer it solely from the material collected.

This leaves a further question for prevention. Extremist ideas can help someone justify violence or choose a target, while personal grievances may influence why they become receptive to those ideas. Their relative importance will differ from case to case. Understanding that relationship requires examining how the person’s intentions developed and whether their interest in violence began turning into preparation. An ideological label can guide that inquiry, but it cannot answer those questions on its own.

The Violence Between the Labels

The difficulty becomes clearer when extremist material points in several directions at once. Europol describes overlapping ideological influences, including exchanges between jihadist and right-wing circles that might appear to have little in common. Some individuals draw selectively from both, without resolving the contradictions between them. For an investigator, the question is what those ideas meant to that person and how they influenced their conduct.

Consider a case from Italy. On 12 February 2025, authorities arrested a 15-year-old who, according to Europol’s account, was suspected of belonging to a Satanist, neo-Nazi supremacist group and had joined another right-wing group allegedly planning a terrorist attack. Investigators also found Islamic State propaganda, including execution footage and instructions for improvised explosives. The discovery does not establish that he was equally committed to both ideologies, or explain precisely what attracted him to either. It does show why describing his online activity as exclusively right-wing would leave part of the evidence unexplained.

Magdeburg raises a different question: how closely did an attacker’s public political views correspond to his reasons for acting? The man who drove into the city’s Christmas market in December 2024 had expressed hostility towards Islam and support for far-right views. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 2026. Investigators attributed the attack to dissatisfaction with the outcome of a legal dispute and the failure of several criminal complaints. His political statements were relevant background, but could not, on their own, establish the purpose of the attack.

In Britain, the Southport case exposed the consequences of assessing a fixation with violence primarily through an ideological lens. Axel Rudakubana, who murdered three girls in July 2024, possessed an al-Qaeda training manual, yet prosecutors described an obsession with violence and genocide rather than an identifiable ideological motive. He had been referred to Prevent three times before the attack, without progressing to its Channel support programme. The subsequent Prevent learning review found that the absence of ideology dominated the handling of all three referrals and may have drawn attention away from his susceptibility to radicalisation. It also identified unfinished enquiries and insufficient scrutiny of the repeated referrals. The failure involved how the available evidence was assessed, as well as how the case was classified.

These cases should not be collapsed into a single account of radicalisation. The Italian case illustrates conflicting ideological influences; Magdeburg highlights the difficulty of inferring motive from public beliefs. Southport shows how uncertainty about ideology can affect decisions about intervention. The distinction matters because how authorities interpret the evidence can shape both the classification of a case and the response it receives.

What Falls Through the Cracks

Europol’s headline figures reflect cases classified as terrorist offences by Member States. Violent extremist incidents provide context but are excluded from its quantitative totals. Conduct recorded solely as an ordinary criminal offence will therefore not appear in those figures, even when it emerges from an online environment also associated with terrorism. The totals are useful for tracking recorded terrorist offences, but cannot on their own show the full extent of violence associated with these networks.

Prevention faces a related difficulty, although unclear motives are already recognised in existing guidance. The Southport learning review discusses guidance circulated in 2019 on mixed, unclear or unstable ideologies, alongside categories introduced in April 2024 covering cases such as a fascination with extreme violence. The question is therefore how this guidance affects decisions in practice. Recording uncertainty about ideology should prompt assessors to examine the other evidence, rather than become a reason to discount it.

This does not mean treating every hateful belief or personal grievance as a terrorism concern. Europol’s account of The Com shows that conduct within the same ecosystem can receive different legal classifications, including ordinary criminal or public-order offences. Those distinctions should remain meaningful. But deciding that a concern falls outside counterterrorism does not settle whether another service needs to act. That requires a separate assessment of the conduct and any risk it presents.

A Second Lens, Not Another Box

Adding a category called “mixed” or “hybrid” terrorism would not, by itself, resolve these difficulties. Europe needs to make fuller use of a second lens alongside ideological classification: one focused on how someone moves towards violence. That approach has foundations in prevention research on the interaction between personal circumstances and wider influences. The task is to apply it consistently when beliefs are contradictory, or motives remain uncertain.

Ideology would remain part of the assessment. So would the distinction between expressing an interest in violence and taking steps to carry it out. Are threats becoming more specific? Has someone begun investigating a target or obtaining weapons in circumstances that suggest preparation for an attack? Such questions should guide a contextual assessment, not produce an automatic prediction. Personal grievance or mental ill-health alone cannot establish violent intent. Assessors need to explain why particular conduct raises concern, while remaining open to evidence that changes their judgement.

The EU Knowledge Hub on Prevention of Radicalisation, which connects practitioners with policymakers and researchers, offers a practical place to develop this work. It could help Member States compare existing assessment frameworks and identify gaps in how they record evidence about motives and preparations for violence alongside ideological influences. Where ideology is unclear or absent, the record should say so. It should also distinguish facts from an assessor’s interpretation.

Where gaps are identified, a limited pilot could test whether adjustments to existing frameworks improve authorities’ understanding of cases. Its value should be judged by better-informed decisions and appropriate referrals, instead of by the number of people flagged. Any sharing of identifiable information would need a lawful basis and clear limits on access and retention.

National referral systems should likewise follow a “no wrong door” principle. When counterterrorism declines a referral, the decision should explain whether the concern warrants assessment by another service and who is responsible for taking it forward. Where further action is justified, there should be confirmation that the receiving service has accepted responsibility. Where it is not, the case should be closed rather than passed indefinitely between institutions.

Europe should not redefine every act of extreme violence as terrorism. It should become better at seeing a movement towards violence before the motive becomes neat enough to name.