About the Nordic Security Advisory
Independent security advisory group.
Nordic Security Advisory (NSA) is an advisory group that focuses on terrorism, violent extremism, hybrid threats, and emerging attack vectors that are relevant to Nordic security. NSA is non-partisan, strictly advisory, and non-operational. It does not conduct intelligence collection or law-enforcement activity. Instead, it provides structured analysis, horizon scanning, and practitioner-informed insight to competent authorities and selected partners.
Members include former law-enforcement and security service officers, defence and security experts, researchers, technologists, and senior analysts. Many have participated in real counterterrorism operations, worked in situ in conflict areas, testified in courts, or led analytical work in their institutions. Membership is by invitation only and is subject to vetting and confidentiality obligations.
Mission, mandate, and areas of work
NSA’s mission is to anticipate, analyse, and communicate evolving threats that may impact Nordic societies. The group works across several interconnected areas of work:
Terrorism and violent extremism
Monitoring transnational terrorism and violent extremism across the ideological spectrum, including religiously inspired terrorism, far-right and far-left extremism, separatist actors, single-issue movements, and lone-actor violence.
Radicalisation and facilitation systems
Mapping recruitment pipelines, examining logistical and financial facilitation, and studying how mainstream platforms intersect with extremist subcultures, narratives, and support networks.
Hybrid and asymmetric threats
Assessing how state and non-state actors blend disinformation, intimidation, proxy violence, and other instruments with terrorism and extremism to influence public opinion, decision-making, and institutional behaviour.
Emerging technologies
Analysing technology-enabled attack vectors, such as malicious use of unmanned aircraft systems, AI-supported tools, cyber-physical systems, and data-driven targeting capabilities, and assessing how these developments interact with existing threat landscapes.
Operational lessons and exercises
Extracting lessons from incidents, near misses, and exercises, and designing tabletop scenarios and red-teaming activities to test preparedness and decision-making in security and policy communities.
Strategic foresight and horizon scanning
Scanning global developments, experimentation spaces, and conflict theatres, and identifying early indicators and weak signals that may point to future risks for Nordic actors.
Geographic focus
Nordic core, European depth, and global horizon scanning.
NSA applies a layered geographic focus. The core layer is the Nordic region. The second layer covers EU and wider European developments. The outer layer is global horizon scanning, with particular attention to conflicts, innovation hubs, and ecosystems that can generate second-order risks for Nordic societies.
Ethics, neutrality, and information handling
NSA is non-partisan and does not engage with political parties or advocacy movements. All activities are guided by respect for democratic values and fundamental rights, analytical independence, and confidentiality. The group relies primarily on open-source information, complemented, where appropriate, by lawfully shared partner material. Source reliability and information credibility are assessed using an intelligence-informed framework, and confidence levels are communicated transparently in advisory outputs.