Transnational terrorism hot spots: Identification and impact evaluation

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

To combat transnational terrorism, it is important to understand its geography. The extant literature on the geography of terrorism, however, is small and focuses on the distribution and diffusion of terrorism among aggregate regions such as Europe and the Middle East. In this analysis, we study transnational terrorism hot spots at the country level. We employ local spatial statistics to identify terrorism hot spot neighborhoods and countries that are located within. We also assess empirically the impact of these hot spots on future patterns of terrorist incidents. We find that countries with significant experiences with terrorism are often located within these hot spots, but that not all countries within the hot spots have experienced large numbers of terrorist incidents. We also find in a pooled time-series analysis of 112 countries from 1975 to 1997 that when a country is located within a hot spot neighborhood, a large increase in the number of terrorist attacks is likely to occur in the next period. This effect is robust under alternative definitions of geographic proximity and across the two most popular measures of local hot spots of data-the G* statistic and the Local Moran's I. These findings have important implications for the continuing fight against transnational terrorism.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationTransnational Terrorism
PublisherTaylor and Francis
Pages65-80
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9781351877824
ISBN (Print)9781409449355
StatePublished - Nov 11 2019
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Geography of terrorism
  • Hot spot
  • Spatial statistics
  • Transnational terrorism

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Social Sciences

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