Municipalities and other forms of local government function as the backbone of European counterterrorism strategies. The rationale behind the responsibilisation of municipalities is that they are perceived as best positioned to discover and intervene against signs and factors that indicate vulnerability to radicalisation among specific groups or individuals. This chapter explores how vulnerability to radicalisation is made sense of in Swedish (n=20) and Danish (n=20) municipal preventing/countering violent extremism (P/CVE) policies, and we then categorise our findings according to a typology of societal, group and individual level factors. Drawing on sociological institutionalism and previous literature on P/CVE policymaking, we discuss the cognitive-cultural dynamics underpinning the rationalisations of vulnerability in the policies. The chapter shows how municipalities in both countries predominantly perceive radicalisation as driven by societal injustice. This narrative functions to legitimise radicalisation as a municipal issue and, therefore, mobilise social welfare actors and practices in the organisation. In addition, this finding suggests that the differences between national level polices, where Denmark has been found to draw more explicitly on a societal security logic, while Sweden leans towards a social care logic, seem to fade out as radicalisation is localised and made into a municipal issue.

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