Transnational Terrorist Incidents Research Articles

Does transnational terrorism stimulate foreign assistance?

This paper quantifies how past transnational terrorist attacks against a potential donor's assets result in enhanced foreign aid flows to a country hosting the responsible terrorist group. Given the reversed causality between foreign aid and terrorism, our empirical analysis puts forward an instrumental variable. Both conflict and governance assistance are shown to stem from transnational terrorist incidents involving recipient–donor dyads during 1974–2013 for a global sample. For recipient-related terrorism, lagged transnational terrorist events against a donor's assets display a robust positive impact on conflict and governance aid. Placebo or falsification tests support the exogeneity of the instrument.

Foreign aid and terrorist groups: incidents, ideology, and survival

During recent decades, terrorist groups have sought refuge in weak or failed states from which to launch their attacks. Foreign aid to states harboring those groups may or may not be an effective counterterrorism strategy. The current paper investigates that strategy from resident terrorist groups’ perspectives while accounting for their ideologies. In particular, we investigate how conflict aid and other forms of assistance affect the number of domestic and transnational terrorist incidents perpetrated by resident groups of religious, leftist, or nationalist orientations. Our analysis indicates that aid influences not only resident groups’ terror campaigns but also their survival prospects. Groups’ ideologies play important roles in counterterrorism aid’s effectiveness. To address possible aid-terrorism endogeneity, our regressions rely on novel instruments.

National and Transnational Impacts of Terror on Hotel Stock Prices

This study aims to explore the sensitivity of hotel stock prices to national and transnational terrorist incidents that occur at the world’s top five tourist destinations. Event study analysis and the generalized sign test are the estimation techniques used in this study. Overall, hotel stocks were found to react differently to terrorist activities. U.S. hotel stocks were the most affected, and French hotel stocks were the least affected by domestic terrorist attacks. However, U.K. hotel stocks were the most influenced and Thai hotel stocks were the least influenced by transnational terrorist incidents. Based on the overall findings, several diversification, hedging, and speculation strategies are proposed for mitigating the effects of these influences to financial market stakeholders and hotel managers. This study recommends further studies to be conducted including various sectors to reveal how different sectors react to terrorist activities.

Democracies at risk? A forecasting analysis of regime type and the risk of terrorist attack

How substantial is democracy as a cause of transnational terrorist attacks? Can our identification of democratic political systems help us to anticipate the flow of transnational terrorism? We seek to address these questions by analyzing data on transnational terrorist incidents from 1968 to 2007. We rely on receiver operating curves as a diagnostic tool to assess forecasting ability of various models of terrorist activity. Our analyses yield four central conclusions. First, our model of transnational terrorism provides a fairly strong basis for forecasting attacks—at least at the (relatively broad) level of the country-year. Second, while the overall forecasting capacity of this model is fairly strong, democracy adds very little to our capacity to forecast terrorist attacks relative to a parsimonious model that includes only distance and the prior history of terrorism. Collectively, these two variables perform about as well as a much more broadly specified model in forecasting terrorist attacks out of sample. Third, the model is highly redundant in a predictive sense. That is, many if not most of the other variables appear to provide similar information in terms of identifying terrorist attacks. Finally, we suggest that scholars focus on the development of more fine-grained and time-variant predictive indicators in order to improve our ability to forecast transnational terrorism.

International Terrorism and the Political Survival of Leaders

This study examines whether transnational terrorist attacks impact the political survival of leaders. We argue that external security threats, such as those from transnational terrorist incidents, can undermine incumbent target governments by exposing foreign policy failures and damaging society’s general well-being. Yet, terrorism may not destabilize democratic governments as a result of citizens rallying around their elected leaders in threatening times. Focusing on Archigos’ survival leadership data and International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events’ terrorism data for the 1968–2004 period, we find that autocrats who experience higher instances of transnational terrorist attacks are more likely to exit power. Democrats, however, are relatively secure to the destabilizing influence of transnational terrorism.

Responding to Terrorism? Human Rights Organization Shaming and Terrorist Attacks

ABSTRACTWhy do Human Rights Organizations (HROs) target or “shame” countries for human rights abuses? The literature using country-level factors to explain why one country is likely to be targeted over another is growing but many questions still remain. Terrorist activity in a country should have a positive effect on the amount of shaming directed at a country. HROs are in the publicity business and have organizational interests to shame states already receiving attention. Findings show that there is a connection between certain types of transnational terrorist incidents occur in a country and the amount of HRO shaming of governments, even after accounting for the human rights practices within the state.

INTERPOL's Surveillance Network in Curbing Transnational Terrorism.

This paper investigates the role that International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) surveillance—the Mobile INTERPOL Network Database (MIND) and the Fixed INTERPOL Network Database (FIND)—played in the War on Terror since its inception in 2005. MIND/FIND surveillance allows countries to screen people and documents systematically at border crossings against INTERPOL databases on terrorists, fugitives, and stolen and lost travel documents. Such documents have been used in the past by terrorists to transit borders. By applying methods developed in the treatment‐effects literature, this paper establishes that countries adopting MIND/FIND experienced fewer transnational terrorist attacks than they would have had they not adopted MIND/FIND. Our estimates indicate that, on average, from 2008 to 2011, adopting and using MIND/FIND results in 0.5 fewer transnational terrorist incidents each year per 100 million people. Thus, a country like France with a population just above 64 million people in 2008 would have 0.32 fewer transnational terrorist incidents per year owing to its use of INTERPOL surveillance. This amounts to a sizeable average proportional reduction of about 30 percent.

Terrorist attack and target diversity

Terrorists choose from a wide variety of targets and attack methods. Unlike past literature, this article investigates how diversity in target choice and attack modes among domestic and transnational terrorists has evolved and changed over the past 40 years. Changes in the practice of homeland security, which affects the marginal costs of target–attack combinations, and changes in the dominant terrorist influence at the global level, which affects the marginal benefits of target–attack combinations, drive the changepoints. Our empirical analysis relies on count data drawn from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) for 1970–2010 that distinguishes between domestic and transnational terrorist incidents. Given the data-intensity requirements of our methods, the study is necessarily from a global perspective. A Bayesian Reversible Jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) changepoint analysis is applied to identify arrival rate changes in both domestic and transnational terrorism. The changepoints in these aggregate series are then matched with those of the subset time series for attack modes (e.g. assassinations and bombings) and target types (e.g. officials and private parties). The underlying drivers of these changepoints are then identified. The article also calculates a Herfindahl index of attack diversity for the aggregate and component domestic and transnational terrorism time series for the entire period and during four subperiods. The variation in both domestic and transnational terrorist attacks has generally fallen over the last four decades; nevertheless, this diversity still remains high. Bombings of private parties have become the preferred target–attack combination for both transnational and domestic terrorists. This combination is the hardest-to-defend target–attack combination and requires the most homeland security resources. Policymakers can use these and other results to focus their counter-terrorism measures.

COMMON DRIVERS OF TRANSNATIONAL TERRORISM: PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS

This article applies principal component analysis to decompose transnational terrorism during 1970–2007 into common (worldwide) and idiosyncratic (country‐specific) factors. Regardless of alternative thresholds and filtering procedures, a single common factor is related to individual countries' transnational terrorist events. Based on a conventional criterion, Lebanon's transnational terrorism is the key common driver of global transnational terrorist incidents. With a more conservative criterion, four additional countries—United States, Germany, Iraq, and the United Kingdom—are core countries in explaining cross‐sectional correlation across 106 countries' transnational terrorism. The analysis shows that there is a marked cross‐sectional dependence among transnational terrorist incidents worldwide. (JEL C38, H56)

Does terror increase aid?

This article investigates empirically whether, and in what ways, donors in the Development Assistance Committee respond to transnational terrorist incidents and the onset of the War on Terror by changing aid effort and aid allocation. First, an analysis of 22 donor countries shows that aid effort increased during the War on Terror period, but did not respond to the actual number of terror events. Second, using aid allocation equations, we find that countries where terror originates are not more likely to receive aid as a consequence, but if they are selected, they receive larger amounts of aid. Our results imply that politicians may still have to learn from economic research. To the extent that development aid can effectively combat terror across the world, as recent research suggests it does, politicians would be well-advised to target aid to those countries where terrorist groups exist in abundance.

The adverse effect of transnational and domestic terrorism on growth in Africa

This article investigates the adverse effects of domestic and transnational terrorism on income per capita growth for 51 African countries for 1970–2007, while accounting for cross-sectional (spatial) dependence and conflict (i.e. internal conflicts and external wars). The findings of the fixed-effects panel estimator suggest that transnational terrorism has a significant, but modest, marginal impact on income per capita growth. These results hold for two different terrorism event datasets. However, domestic terrorist events do not affect income per capita growth. Our findings differ from those in an earlier study on the impact of transnational terrorism on African growth, because we uncover a much more moderate effect. In our study, regional impacts and terrorism–conflict interactions effects are also distinguished. Moreover, our sample countries and period are more extensive. Our article contains a host of robustness checks involving macroeconomic and political variables that find virtually identical results. Alternative terrorist variables are also used, with little qualitative change in the findings. The absence of a domestic terrorism impact is surprising because there were many more domestic than transnational terrorist incidents in Africa. To promote growth, host and donor countries must direct scarce counter-terrorism resources to protect against transnational terrorism in particular. The modest impact of transnational terrorism on African growth means that developing countries' economies have been more resilient to terrorism than has been generally thought.

Domestic versus transnational terrorism: Data, decomposition, and dynamics

This article devises a method to separate the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) into transnational and domestic terrorist incidents. This decomposition is essential for the understanding of some terrorism phenomena when the two types of terrorism are hypothesized to have different impacts. For example, transnational terrorism may have a greater adverse effect than domestic terrorism on economic growth. Moreover, the causes of the two types of terrorism may differ. Once the data are separated, we apply a calibration method to address some issues with GTD data – namely, the missing data for 1993 and different coding procedures used before 1998. In particular, we calibrate the GTD transnational terrorist incidents to ITERATE transnational terrorist incidents to address GTD’s undercounting of incidents in much of the 1970s and its overcounting of incidents in much of the 1990s. Given our assumption that analogous errors characterize domestic terrorist events in GTD, we apply the same calibrations to adjust GTD domestic incidents. The second part of the article investigates the dynamic aspects of GTD domestic and transnational terrorist incidents, based on the calibrated data. Contemporaneous and lagged cross-correlations for the two types of terrorist incidents are computed for component time series involving casualties, deaths, assassinations, bombings, and armed attacks. We find a large cross-correlation between domestic and transnational terrorist incidents that persists over a number of periods. A key finding is that shocks to domestic terrorism result in persistent effects on transnational terrorism; however, the reverse is not true. This finding suggests that domestic terrorism can spill over to transnational terrorism, so that prime-target countries cannot ignore domestic terrorism abroad and may need to assist in curbing this homegrown terrorism.

Does Terror Increase Aid?

This article empirically investigates whether, and in which ways, donors in the Development Assistance Committee respond to transnational terrorist incidents and the onset of the War on Terror through changes in aid effort and aid allocation. First, an analysis of 22 donor countries shows that aid effort increased during the War on Terror period, but did not respond to the actual number of terror events. Second, using aid allocation equations, we find that countries where terror originates are not more likely to receive aid as a consequence, but if they are selected, they receive larger amounts of aid.

Democratic Competition and Terrorist Activity

Why is terrorist activity more prevalent in democracies than in nondemocracies? I argue that the main motivation for terrorist attacks in democracies is intergroup dynamics, with terrorist groups of various ideologies competing with one another for limited political influence. I conduct a cross-national, longitudinal analysis of 119 countries for the period 1975–97, using political competition as the key independent variable and the number of transnational terrorist incidents originating in the country as the dependent variable. I find preliminary support for the hypothesis that intergroup competition, motivated by the competition of the political regime, explains an increase in terrorist incidents originating in a state. Evidence also reveals a positive relationship between political competition and the number of terrorist groups that emerge within a state and a positive relationship between the density of domestic interest group participation and terrorist activity. Officials should consider intergroup ...

FORECASTING SERIES CONTAINING OFFSETTING BREAKS: OLD SCHOOL AND NEW SCHOOL METHODS OF FORECASTING TRANSNATIONAL TERRORISM

Transnational terrorism data are difficult to forecast because they contain an unknown number of structural breaks of unknown functional form. The rise of religious fundamentalism, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the rise of al Qaeda have changed the nature of transnational terrorism. ‘Old School’ forecasting methods simply smooth or difference the data. ‘New School’ methods use estimated break dates to control for regime shifts when forecasting. We compare the various forecasting methods using a Monte Carlo study with data containing different types of breaks. The study's results are used to forecast various types of transnational terrorist incidents.

Has the Global War on Terror Changed the Terrorist Threat? A Time-Series Intervention Analysis

Whether the Global War on Terror (GWOT) has changed the terrorist threat is a matter of controversy. This study, using transnational terrorism events data from 1993 through 2004, employs a time-series approach to investigate the extent to which the onset of the GWOT (beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan) and related events (the invasion of Iraq, the capture of Saddam Hussein, and the release of photos from Abu Ghraib) are associated with changes in transnational terrorist activity, its frequency, dispersion, lethality, type of attack, and type of victim of transnational terrorist incidents.

Winning the Right War

Winning the Right War

Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?

This article studies the various mechanisms by which democracy affects transnational terrorism. New theoretical mechanisms are identified that either complement or encompass existing arguments. Different effects of democracy on transnational terrorism are assessed for a sample of about 119 countries from 1975 to 1997. Results show that democratic participation reduces transnational terrorist incidents in a country, while government constraints increase the number of those incidents, subsuming the effect of press freedom. The proportional representation system experiences fewer transnational terrorist incidents than either the majoritarian or the mixed system.

Economic Globalization and Transnational Terrorism

The effect of economic globalization on the number of transnational terrorist incidents within countries is analyzed statistically, using a sample of 112 countries from 1975 to 1997. Results show that trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), and portfolio investment have no direct positive effect on transnational terrorist incidents within countries and that economic developments of a country and its top trading partners reduce the number of terrorist incidents inside the country. To the extent that trade and FDI promote economic development, they have an indirect negative effect on transnational terrorism.

Patterns of Transnational Terrorism, 1970-1999: Alternative Time-Series Estimates

Using alternative time-series methods, this paper investigates the patterns of transnational terrorist incidents that involve one or more deaths. Initially, an updated analysis of these fatal events for 1970–1999 is presented using a standard linear model with prespecified interventions that represent significant policy and political impacts. Next, a (regime-switching) threshold autoregressive (TAR) model is applied to this fatality time series. TAR estimates indicate that increases above the mean are not sustainable during high-activity eras, but are sustainable during low-activity eras. The TAR model provides a better fit than previously tried methods for the fatality time series. By applying a Fourier approximation to the nonlinear estimates, we get improved results. The findings in this study and those in our earlier studies are then applied to suggest some policy implications in light of the tragic attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.