The Council of Europe was formed in 1949 as an International Organisation pursuing human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Europe. Its early activities were oriented towards the harmonisation of extradition policies between Member States, as well as the development of crime prevention and Social Defence policies to complement the global activities of the United Nations.

The European Committee on Crime Problems was established in 1958 and was a leading international advocate of social crime prevention throughout the decades. The Committee vigorously pursued multi-agency approaches to preventing juvenile delinquency. However, this preventive ontology was very late in transferring to counterterrorism activities of the Council of Europe. As our timeline shows, the Council of Europe utilised a legislative, and reactive, model to terrorism until 2012 - after the EU had already constructed the Radicalisation Awareness Network and endorsed the 'radicalisation' & P/CVE approach to terrorism. It was only after 2012 that the Council began to issue its own recommendations on radicalisation prevention (emphasizing its 'reactive' character to developments in other multi-lateral organisations and nation states).

The post-9/11 era of counterterrorism in the Council of Europe is particularly interesting for this divergence between its social crime prevention work (where it was an early adopter of anticipatory, multi-agency interventions to support 'vulnerable' youth at-risk of becoming criminal) and its counterterrorism work (where the Council was a late-adopter of anticipatory P/CVE ontology).

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