The Spatial Analysis of Terrorism in Pakistan

Abstract

Abstract Many governments, political economists and terrorist experts consider the use of military and police forces as the ultimate way to effectively deter terrorism. The most effective negative sanctions are considered to be military strikes, aggressive actions (including crackdowns, search operations, raids and shelling) against individuals known or suspected of being terrorists, or against organizations and persons who allegedly support terrorists. Do these negative sanctions effectively deter terrorism? To explore this question, I test displacement, diffusion of terrorism control benefits and vengeance hypotheses of terrorism prevention interventions in Pakistan. The displacement proposition holds when policy intervention raises the opportunity cost of terrorist activities in a given geographic space, thus, increases terrorist incidents in the neighborhoods, where opportunity cost is low. If the same policy decreases terrorism in the adjacent neighborhood, the diffusion proposition holds. Lastly, the vengeance hypothesis illustrates that intervention decreases the opportunity cost of terrorism which escalates more violence. This study explores district level spatial variation in terrorist incidents and terrorism prevention strategies from 2001 to 2012. It shows that terrorism prevention interventions significantly displace terrorism to the neighboring units. The results further illustrate that spatial differences in the legal framework across districts against terrorism related crimes lead to significant cross sectional variation in terrorist attacks.