The continuous upsurge in terrorist activities makes it necessary to rapidly, efficiently, and reliably understand, detect, and/or prevent explosive threats. As such, intense research efforts continue to improve methods of detection and characterization of explosives through development of novel approaches and/or improvement of existing ones. This is especially true for home-made and/or improvised explosives devices. These next-generation threats require detection methods that will be sensitive and selective to a wide variety of traditional and non-traditional explosives and should be applicable in numerous detection scenarios. This review attempts to outline recent developments in the detection and characterization of explosives.