New directions for terrorism research

We propose two new directions for terrorism research. One is to adopt a comparative framework, as we note that there was another wave of terrorism between 1878 and 1914 that strongly resembles today's 1968-present wave of international terrorism. The two should be compared, and at different levels of analysis from the individual terrorist incident through global spirals of terrorist waves. Second, we suggest that international terrorism is not an essentialist entity that can simply be contrasted with domestic terrorism. There is variation in degree of internationality. We propose a simple technique for measuring the different states of internationalness that transnational terrorism might take. In this regard, we analyze data on terrorist incidents between 1975 and 2004 to closely examine the unfolding of the proposed four stages in which terrorism internationalizes.