Domestic Attacks Research Articles

When Socialism Meets Terrorism: A Computer-Assisted Discursive News Values Analysis of Chinese Newspapers’ Coverage of Domestic and International Terrorist Attacks

ABSTRACT Terrorist attacks, as a particular type of negative social event, are a potential threat to the establishment of a “Socialist Harmonious Society” advocated by the Chinese government. To shed light on how Chinese journalists construct reports on terrorist attacks and, more broadly, how non-Western countries report on negative social issues, we compared newspaper coverage of one domestic attack with four international incidents. Starting from Bednarek and Caple’s framework, we further developed the computer-assisted Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) they proposed by adapting individual definitions of news values and dividing them into 15 subcategories to suit the Chinese context, the topic of terrorism, and the automatic processing of large-scale datasets. Based on our understanding, we developed an open-source list of Chinese lexical indicators by Part of Speech tagging, sentiment, collocation, and concordance analysis, with a view to providing resources to support future quantitative DNVA. Following this approach, we found that while market factors enabled Chinese newspapers to cover domestic terrorist attacks, media adopted specific media strategies to meet political needs, which differed from those used to cover international attacks. These different media strategies can be explained by the Chinese developmentalist ideology and harmonious cultural traditions.

Domestic terrorism, incumbency, and legislative vote shares

A small number of studies have examined the effect terrorism has on political ideology and vote choice cross-nationally. However, scholars yet to understand how terrorist attack type influences vote choice based on the political ideology of incumbent governments. Thus, we examine the effect domestic and transnational terrorist attacks have on vote choice in legislative elections while accounting for the ideology of the incumbent government. In examining 56 democracies from 1975 – 2014 from various regions and levels of development, we find that domestic attacks, and not transnational, significantly effect both right and left party votes shares when the incumbent party in government is of a similar ideology. We attribute these results to the perception of instability that accompanies domestic attacks and the effects it has on voters’ evaluations of political parties. These findings have important implications for understanding how terrorism influences electoral behavior.

Do natural disasters fuel terrorism? The role of state capacity

Natural disasters create a fertile environment for terrorists by creating or exacerbating vulnerabilities within a state. Previous research has found mixed evidence regarding the effect of natural disasters on terrorist activity. In the present paper, we reconcile these views by putting state capacity in the spotlight using a dataset of 165 countries from 1970 to 2018 and an iterative Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator. We show that states with high military capacity experience increased domestic attacks, whereas states with high bureaucratic capacity experience fewer attacks. This dichotomy arises as different actors are involved in disaster-relief in the two types of states. These findings indicate that in a world that experiences more natural disasters, investment in bureaucratic capacity can serve as an efficient policy against terrorism. In contrast, in the same setting, excessive investment in military capacity increases terrorist incidents.

Silver Lining? The Effects of Epidemics on Terrorist Groups

ABSTRACT In this study we examine the effects of epidemics on terrorist groups’ attack capacities. We consider two theoretical relationships between epidemics and terrorist groups. By weakening government counterterrorism defenses and increasing popular grievances, epidemics can provide a strategic environment that is conducive to terrorist groups, enhancing their capacity to commit more attacks, yield higher casualties and launch more logistically complex attacks. Conversely, epidemics can impair the abilities of terrorist groups to launch attacks by eroding group capacity and access to resources while incentivizing the state to increase its surveillance and policing capabilities. We test these two competing arguments using a database of over 620 terrorist groups for the period of 1970 to 2016. Our findings support the second argument. Terrorist groups based or operating in countries experiencing more and more intense epidemics commit fewer attacks, generally produce fewer casualties, commit a lower ratio of transnational to domestic attacks and less frequently use multi-mode attacks. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings.

The effects of terrorist incidents on public worry of future attacks, views of the police and social cohesion

Abstract Despite a growing body of research examining the psychological effects of terrorist incidents, there remains comparatively little empirical assessment of their impacts on citizens’ worry about further attacks, perceptions of the police or social cohesion. Drawing on interviews with nearly 100,000 London residents, we find higher levels of worry following most domestic attacks. Improvements in overall ratings of the police are tempered by more negative assessments of their ability to handle future threats. We also find that far-right incidents are less closely linked to changes in public ratings of the police and concerns about future attacks compared to Islamic terror attacks. Effects on social cohesion are less predictable. We find reductions in cohesion following some attacks but increases following others.

The end of privacy for the populace, the person of interest and the persecuted

Erosion of US and foreign citizens’ privacy has resulted from the escalating use of electronic devices; creation of gargantuan commercial and government/intelligence databases; government access to business data; and the motivation and ever more sophisticated ability to mine and unaccountably use such information. After suffering the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the US government led the way in globally collecting and exploiting personal data. This ultimately required revisions to existing US law, as well as altered legal interpretations of constitutional protections for civil liberties. The overwhelming focus of US communications and electronic storage policy has been on offensive intelligence operations; collection has been enhanced partly by undermining cyber defense for companies and citizens. As with other business sectors, US medical information now is vulnerable to both criminal cyber-attack and government access. This article is authored by a former US intelligence community and national security professional with highly specialized proficiencies and experience at some of the top levels of intelligence oversight – where technical, operational, analytic, inter-agency, legislative, regulatory, legal and budget activities converge. Using unclassified and public sources, the author summarizes the types and breadth of US domestic collection and its distribution, the degree to which individuals’ privacy may be impinged, abuse of these powers, and effects on governance. Resulting US ability to spot and forestall pending domestic terror attacks - the rationale used to justify surveillance without end - is evaluated.

A Survey on Security Aspects of Server Virtualization in Cloud Computing

Significant exploitation and utilization of cloud computing in industry is come with and in the identical time vulnerable by unease regarding protection of data hold by cloud computing providers. One of the penalties of moving data processing and storage off business site is that organizations have fewer controls over their infrastructure. seeing that, cloud service (CS) providers must hope that the CS provider is capable to protect their data and infrastructure from both exterior and domestic attacks. Presently however, such hope can only rely on organizational procedures stated by the CS provider and cannot be remotely verified and validated by an external party. The central distinction between cloud computing and conventional enterprise internal Information Technology services is that the proprietor and the consumer of cloud Information Technology infrastructures are separated in cloud. This transform requires a safety responsibility severance in cloud computing. Cloud service providers (CSP) should safe the services they propose and cannot surpass the customers’ authorities. Virtualization is a buildup utterance in the Information Technology world. With the assure to reduce the ever mounting infrastructure inside data centers connected to other important apprehensions such as ease of use and scalability, virtualization technology has been in advance recognition not only with IT experts yet also among administrators and executives as well. The progressively more growing rate of the approval of this technology has exposed these systems to new protection concerns which in recent history have been unnoticed or merely overlooked. This paper presents an in depth state of art gaze at present most old server virtualization explanations, as well as a writing study on different security matters found inside this virtualization technology. These problems can be practical to all the existing virtualization technologies accessible with no spotlight on a specific answer. Nevertheless, we do susceptibility investigation of two of the mainstream recognized virtualization answers: VMware ESX and Xen. to conclude, we illustrate some clarifications on how to progress the security of online banking and electronic commerce, using virtualization.

Is government decentralization useful in the fight against domestic terrorism? A cross-country analysis

This article examines the link between government decentralization and domestic terrorism in 65 countries over the period 1976–2009. The results show the existence of a U-shaped relationship between fiscal devolution and the number of domestic terror attacks. This implies that fiscal decentralization first contributes to reducing domestic terrorist activity. However, beyond a certain threshold level, the relationship becomes positive, indicating that the transfer of fiscal power to subnational governments increases the incidence of domestic terrorism. Furthermore, our findings also reveal that the number of domestic terror attacks is higher in those countries in which subnational governments are characterized by greater levels of political autonomy. These results are obtained after controlling for a number of factors that could plausibly be correlated with both the incidence of domestic terrorism and government decentralization, such as the level of economic development, country size, the extent of civil liberties and democracy, the degree of trade openness, or geographical features.

Modeling Terrorist Attacks: Assessing Statistical Models to Evaluate Domestic and Ideologically International Attacks

ABSTRACTMany prior studies have analyzed how country characteristics affect the rate of terrorist violence and there is a growing literature on how group traits influence terrorist violence. The current study expands on this literature by using multilevel modeling to assess both these units of analysis on the rate of domestic attacks and the rate of attacks against foreign targets. Using data from the Big Allied and Dangerous and the Global Terrorism Database, a cross-national sample of 224 terrorist groups are modeled in relation to their countries of origin to assess rates of domestic attacks. In this cross-sectional study many of these terrorist groups target multiple foreign countries. Multiple membership random effects modeling (MMREM) is used to assess the impact of multiple countries targeted by a group. The results of the study indicate that multilevel modeling provides an improved statistical fit and the MMREM model provides an improved measurement for analyzing attacks targeting foreign countries.

The Homegrown Threat: State Strength, Grievance, and Domestic Terrorism

ABSTRACTScholars maintain that, similar to insurgency, terrorist violence is precipitated by both relative deprivation and state weakness. Yet aggrieved minority groups within a country should turn to terrorism when they are weak relative to the state rather than strong. Empirical evidence shows minority group discrimination and fragile political institutions to independently increase domestic terror attacks. But it remains unclear whether grievances drive domestic terrorism in both strong and weak states. Using data from 172 countries between 1998 and 2007, we find that for strong states the presence of minority discrimination leads to increased domestic terrorism, while for weak states the presence of minority discrimination actually leads to less domestic terrorism. Consequently, increasing state capacity may not be a panacea for antistate violence, as nonstate actors may simply change their strategy from insurgency or guerrilla warfare to terrorism. Efforts to reduce terrorist violence must focus on reducing grievance by eliminating discriminatory policies at the same time that measures to improve state capacity are enacted.

Belgian and French Foreign Fighters in Iraq 2003–2005: A Comparative Case Study

Efforts to understand the distinction between foreign fighting and domestic terrorist acts have focused for the most part at the macro level. This study investigates if this difference is observed at the network level. The Iraq foreign fighter mobilization, which was significant, both numerically and, in terms of its visibility, is used for this analysis. The participation of Belgian and French foreign fighters is examined due to the perceived level of threat they posed in the period 2003–2005 and while absolute numbers are relatively low, these two countries may have provided just under a quarter of the all European foreign fighters in this period. Observations are generated and then compared to research on domestic attack networks in Europe and the United Kingdom. The article finds that the two networks were involved in foreign fighter activity and did not engage in domestic attack activity. Involvement in domestic attacks occurred at a later time via individuals who had left the network, individuals on the periphery of the original foreign fighter network or individuals who unsuccessfully attempted to engage in foreign fighter activity.

Facial disfigurement stigma: a study of victims of domestic assaults with fire in India.

In India, the incidence of fire attacks on women has risen dramatically. Although studies and media accounts describe how and why these attacks occur, no research has investigated the lives of survivors. Qualitative analysis of the texts of two focus groups of women scarred by domestic attacks by fire reveals that these women are heavily stigmatized. Using Yang et al.'s theory that stigma is a response to perceived threats to values of everyday life and feminist theory as guides, the study identified two patterns of moral threat related to disfigurement: (a) Disfigurement challenges values and practices of women's family roles, and (b) disfigurement threatens normative religious sensibilities.

Protecting the Worst Among Us: A Narrow Quarles Public Safety Exception in the Boston Bombing and Other Terror Investigations

This paper considers the public safety exception to the Miranda requirements and how the exception specifically applies to the FBI’s 16-hour pre-Miranda interrogation of suspected Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The paper details the history of the PSE, from its genesis in Quarles to Abdulmutallab and Shahzad, two recent, high-profile domestic terror cases. While evaluating arguments both for a less restrictive reading of the PSE (as has been advocated by many politicians in the wake of domestic terror attacks) and for a narrow reading, the paper argues that the narrower reading’s benefits outweigh its potential costs; such a reading preserves the Constitutional rights of the accused and promotes faith and certainty in the system, and would not result in increased danger to the public.

An Uncommon Accident and Unusual Cause of Death-A Fatal Domestic Ram Attack

Domestic animal attacks are not common; their fatal attacks are even rarer. Herein, a case of a 78-year-old woman attacked by a ram is presented. She sustained multiple head and chest injuries. The autopsy findings and the inspection of the scene revealed that the fatal aortic injury had been caused by direct force from the front, which subsequently caused a powerful anteroposterior chest compression, resulting in an incomplete tear by flexion and compression of the aortic arch. The aortic dissection propagated in both an ante- and retrograde direction, with intact adventitia. However, due to a rise in pressure in the formed false lumen, dissection propagated downward to the base of the heart, and further into the subepicardial adipose tissue, forming a subepicardial hematoma. This hematoma gradually compressed the proximal sections of the coronary arteries, impairing their filling, and producing a myocardial ischemia. In addition, circulation had probably been already disturbed by the right-sided pneumothorax, as well as a possible pneumomediastinum.

The evolution of counterterrorism: will tactics trump strategy?

Counterterrorism efforts over the past five years have yielded important progress against Al-Qaeda abroad, even with heightened anxiety about the threat of attacks at home. There was certainly no ‘clash of civilizations’; violent Salafism engendered a muscular backlash in Muslim-majority countries, which threatened Al-Qaeda's ability to recruit and even survive. At the same time, the policies of major states became more effective and better aligned. A nascent counterterrorism coalition emerged with unprecedented sharing of intelligence, operations and deradicalization techniques (especially bilaterally). In the face of these developments, a defensive Al-Qaeda scrambled to exploit vulnerabilities so as to regain a mental edge. The result was two tactical setbacks for the allies: first, Al-Qaeda and its associates redoubled their efforts to kill civilians on western soil, focusing particularly on radicalized home grown amateurs; and second, they leaned more heavily on reinvigorated affiliates, some of whom tried to project force beyond their local operating areas for the first time. As a result, terrorist operations in the US and UK were more frequent, unpredictable and unsophisticated, but nonetheless potentially lethal. As the period drew to a close, the crucial question was whether the two western allies could maintain their nerve, luck, skill and sufficient equilibrium to both fend off a domestic attack and plan for an effective strategic response in the event that one occurred.

Détente and Domestic Politics

During the first half of the 1970s, Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford responded to the aftermath of Vietnam by avoiding the extremes of the era: massive military retrenchment (left) and massive military escalation (right). The presidents had different reasons for seeking a centrist national security agenda. The Republican presidents were willing to accept and actively pursue arms and trade agreements with the Soviet Union and China. Nixon concluded that appealing to moderates was essential in order to protect a muscular national security state from retrenchment in the aftermath of the 1960s and to ensure his own electoral success. His successor, Gerald Ford, believed that détente with the Soviets could rebuild public confidence in the post-Watergate GOP. But the foreign policy of détente drowned in the turbulent waters of domestic politics in the 1970s. Nixon's and Ford's national security centrism failed to create a stable political majority within the Republican party. The political weakness of each president as well as contradictions in their policies exposed them to domestic attack. At the same time, Soviet aggression undermined their ability to deliver on the promise of détente. Politicians allied with the conservative movement took advantage of presidential vulnerability to move national security politics toward the right. Each president ran head first into two factions in the burgeoning conservative movement, both of which rejected moderation: neoconservatives, who were Democrats disaffected with the leftward drift of their party as a result of the 1960s; and hawkish Republicans, who were rooted in the anticommunist politics of the early Cold War.

Trajectories of terrorism

Research Summary Although researchers began to assemble open‐source terrorism event databases in the late 1960s, until recently most of these databases excluded domestic attacks. This exclusion is particularly misleading for the United States because, although the United States is often perceived to be the central target of transnational terrorism, the domestic attacks of foreign groups targeting the United States are often ignored. We began this article with 53 foreign terrorist groups that have been identified by U.S. State Department and other government sources as posing a special threat to the United States. Using newly available data from the Global Terrorism Database composed of both domestic and transnational terrorist attacks, we examined 16,916 attacks attributed to these groups between 1970 and 2004. We found that just 3% of attacks by these designated anti‐U.S. groups were actually directed at the United States. Moreover, 99% of attacks targeting the United States did not occur on U.S. soil but were aimed at U.S. targets in other countries (e.g., embassies or multilateral corporations). We also found that more than 90% of the non‐U.S. attacks were domestic (i.e., nationals from one country attacking targets of the same nationality in the same country). We used group‐based trajectory analysis to examine the different developmental trajectories of U.S. target and non‐U.S. target terrorist strikes and concluded that four trajectories best capture attack patterns for both. These trajectories outline three terrorist waves—which occurred in the 1970s, 1980s, and the early 21st century—as well as a trajectory that does not exhibit wave‐like characteristics but instead is characterized by irregular and infrequent attacks. Policy Implications Our results underscore the importance of proximity for terrorist targeting. Terrorists, like ordinary criminals, are likely to choose targets close to their operational base. However, when attacks occur further from the terrorists' home bases, they are more deadly. Approximately half of the terrorist organizations studied here exhibited wave‐like boom and bust attack trajectories. Given that most attacks by groups identified as threats by the U.S. government are in fact aimed at non‐U.S. domestic targets, the United States should pursue efforts to strengthen the capacity of local governments to combat terrorism and to communicate to them our understanding that groups that are anti‐United States are also a threat to local governments. In framing counterterrorism policies, the United States should put threats into perspective by acknowledging that we are the exception and local governments are the rule. Terrorism is not just about us.

Achieving PAP-DIB Objective Capabilities by Transforming the Way We Think

The terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001 graphically illustrated the unprecedented changes taking place in today’s global security landscape. Throughout the world, but particularly in North America and Europe, nations were suddenly forced to confront the very real possibility of a devastating domestic attack by a dangerous and unpredictable enemy. In Europe, the situation rapidly evolved from potential threat to deadly crisis, as Madrid was rocked by a series of horrific train bombings in March 2004 and London’s commuter transportation network was disrupted for weeks by Islamic extremist bomb attacks in July 2005. It soon became very clear that European security strategies geared towards traditional collective territorial defense did not provide the capabilities needed to address emerging global security threats. If there were any doubts beforehand, it was clear following these de-

Transformation and Homeland Security: Dual Challenges for the US Army

Army exists to win the nation's wars. That is and always should be its principal mission. Army's transformation White Paper, Concepts of the Objective Force, states, The Army must remain optimized for major theater war,1 with the presumption that this theater of war is overseas. But the Army has other priorities as well. preamble to the Constitution tells us that among our founding principles, our government exists to insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. This statement of existential purpose implies a domestic emphasis--that we must be prepared to fight significantly different kinds of wars from what we think of today. Even after 11 September 2001, the modern concept of war for most American soldiers is something that is fought elsewhere for national security reasons, does not directly affect domestic safety, and does not affect the lives of the average citizens (other tha n our national preoccupation with 24-hour news stations). Yet homeland security is now a major focus of the nation, the Administration, and Congress, and the Army will play a major role in it. This new security situation, dominated not just by the need to project exceptionally lethal force overseas, but also to assist in homeland security, will force change on the military. While once a significant mission of the Army, protecting US citizens from attacks at home has not been a major concern for generations, and the Army has not organized or actively planned for this mission in recent memory. Yet the events of 11 September 2001 have caused us to recognize that many of the asymmetric attacks we prepare to confront in distant combat zones also can be perpetrated against our citizens at home. Homeland security is once again a front-burner issue for the nation. From a formal policy perspective, the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) arguably made homeland defense the Department of Defense's primary mission, and the QDR report states that preparing for homeland security may require changes in force structure and organization. (2) For over a century and a half, from the formation of the nation until World War II, defending the nation-proper from foreign or domestic attack was arguably the primary mission of the Army. (3) Strategists, primarily outside the Pentagon, are once again focusing on the military's role in homeland security, with such issues as the control, composition, and missions of the National Guard receiving significant attention. (4) Juxtaposed to this, almost the entire focus within DOD before 9/l1 was on changing the structure, doctrine, equipment, and supporting institutional functions of the military--what the Army used to call DTLOMS and the joint community now calls DOTMLPF (Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership, Personnel, and Facilities)--through a process called transformation, with the purpose of being better able to fight future wars in faraway places. (5) Since 9/11 this has not changed substantially. For the Army, the ability to project transformed power to distant theaters of war is the major focus. Additionally, the Objective Force concepts for fighting future wars envision nonlinear battlefields, significantly faster operational tempo (optempo) and speed on the battlefield, nearly omniscient commanders and forces with a god's eye view of the battlefield based on almost perfect intelligence, and more sophisticated technology, including the expanded use of robotics. These two strategic focuses create institutional forces--transformation and homeland security--which will drive change in the Army. To date, indications are that they are being considered separately, without regard for their interactions or the realization that, together, they define the military capabilities needed in the new security environment. In this article, I briefly examine each and discuss how they affect expectations and capabilities, using the DOTMLPF model as a template. …

Redefining the Reserve Response

Following years of draw-downs in the Department of Defense and with domestic terrorism now likely to recur since September 2001, this nation needs to rethink and redefine calling in the Reserves for medical responses to terrorism. Neither local civilian emergency medical services nor hospitals could handle a mass casualty event anticipated from terrorist attacks. The mission of the National Guard should not be unduly augmented to include medical care of casualties in the aftermath of terrorist attacks when we have a substantial Reserve medical force across the Department of Defense services. Typically, we think of Reservists as only needed if a war or conflict occurs outside our nation. Despite Reservist medical personnel performing nearly all worldwide U.S. humanitarian missions, Reservists are perceived as persons we begrudge on our taxpayer dollars while they await the call to truer duty. In terms of our highly trained (both civilian and militarily) medical Reservists across the armed forces and commissioned public health system, we need to understand how skilled and truly expert many of them are already. Add the military context and you have the new Ready Reservist in the various health care corps. These are our modern first responders to domestic terrorism in which civilian medical casualties would otherwise be overwhelming to limited civilian hospital, emergency medical services, and public health services. The need for a new paradigm accepted by everyone in the new Homeland Security chain-civilian local authorities to state to federal to Department of Defense-absolutely will be key to our national survival and recovery following any future domestic attacks.