Prevention of Bomb Attacks by Terrorists in Urban Settings: Improvised Explosive Devices

In recent times, a significant amount of policy development has been directed towards assessing, countering, and mitigating the threat from improvised explosive devices (IED) in urban environments. Much of this has been in direct response to the impact of specific terrorist attacks that have occurred in recent times in many cities. Less attention has been positioned towards understanding how policy- and practice-based approaches in disciplines that are not considered mainstream in the counterterrorism discourse could be used to enhance the resilience of new developments linked to the protection of crowded places. This chapter seeks to overcome this by critically analyzing the fundamental questions of “what measures have been undertaken” and, to a lesser extent, “who should be responsible for counterterrorism related protective security measures?”