Samenvatting

The great international waves of terrorist violence did not pass the Netherlands by. This article traces the development of terrorism and counterterrorism through time, from the establishment of the centralized nation-state around 1800 to the present time (with an emphasis on the postwar period). That development is characterized in the Netherlands by the tension between fear of non-state terrorism on the one hand and an (over)reaction of state terror on the other. Both aspects still need to be contained.