Although Lithuania by now has been a member of the international antiterrorist coalition with all the issuing consequences (including its international commitments and new threats for its safety) for more than three years, studies of and research on terrorism in it remain in the embryonic phase. There are practically no contributors writing about the terrorism phenomenon in the Lithuanian language. As a result, there is no discourse about this sphere of studies. This means that so far no well defined terminology and standing conventions of academic parlance have been introduced, which would enable to go deeper into not only the nature of terrorism as a phenomenon (this is being done for at least forty years in the world) but also the perception of terrorism here, in Lithuania.

Reasons which stimulate terrorism, the motivation and goals of terrorists, the perception of the reality of threats as well as readiness to deal with them on both political and social levels - these are the subjects of this article. Though the objective of this article is not to carry out a comparable analysis with the situation and practice of other states, the particular case of Lithuania is conceptualized in the perspective of the international terrorism and global antiterrorist drive.

A peculiar pattern for this article was a recent (published in the spring of 2004) study “International Terrorism and Finland” by Toby Archer, where the threats of terrorism to Finland are analyzed.