Is Transnational Terrorism Becoming More Threatening?

This study applies time-series techniques to investigate the current threat posed by transnational terrorist incidents. Although the number of incidents has dropped dramatically during the post-cold war period, transnational terrorism still presents a significant threat. In recent years, each incident is almost 17 percentage points more likely to result in death or injuries. Three alternative casualties series (incidents with injuries and/or deaths, the proportion of incidents with casualties, and incidents with deaths) are investigated. These series increased in November 1979 with the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and again after the fourth quarter of 1991. The growth of religious terrorism appears to account for the increased severity of terrorist attacks since the last quarter of 1991. All three casualties series displayed more deterministic factors than the noncasualties series, which is largely random after detrending. Cycles in the aggregate incident series are solely attributable to the underlying casualties series.

[1]  Yonah Alexander.  Europe's Red Terrorists: The Fighting Communist Organizations , 1992 .

[2]  Bruce Hoffman,et al.  The confluence of international and domestic trends in terrorism , 1997 .

[3]  John A. C. Conybeare,et al.  Retaliating against Terrorism: Rational Expectations and the Optimality of Rules versus Discretion , 1994 .

[4]  W. Enders.  Applied Econometric Time Series , 1994 .

[5]  Peter Chalk,et al.  The liberal democratic response to terrorism , 1995 .

[6]  M. Juergensmeyer.  Terror mandated by god , 1997 .

[7]  Alex P. Schmid,et al.  Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories, and Literature , 1984 .

[8]  Walter Enders,et al.  Transnational Terrorism in the Post–Cold War Era , 1999 .

[9]  Paul Wilkinson,et al.  Terrorism and the Liberal State , 1977 .

[10]  Walter Enders,et al.  Terrorism and foreign direct investment in spain and greece , 1996 .

[11]  W. Landes,et al.  An Economic Study of U.S. Aircraft Hijacking, 1960-1976 , 1977 .

[12]  Combating terrorism: Report to the committee of legal affairs and citizens’ rights of the European Parliament , 1992 .

[13]  David C. Rapoport.  Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions , 1983, American Political Science Review.

[14]  The European response to terrorism: Restrospect and prospect , 1992 .

[15]  Alex P. Schmid,et al.  Western responses to terrorism: A twenty‐five year balance sheet , 1992 .

[16]  L. Bremer.  The west's counter‐terrorist strategy , 1992 .

[17]  Walter Enders,et al.  The Effectiveness of Antiterrorism Policies: A Vector-Autoregression-Intervention Analysis , 1993, American Political Science Review.

[18]  T. Sandler,et al.  A Theoretical Analysis of Transnational Terrorism , 1983, American Political Science Review.

[19]  Todd Sandler,et al.  International terrorism in the 1980s : a chronology of events , 1989 .

[20]  Walter Enders,et al.  A time‐series analysis of transnational terrorism: Trends and cycles , 1992 .

[21]  William M. Landes,et al.  An Economic Study of U. S. Aircraft Hijacking, 1961-1976 , 1978, The Journal of Law and Economics.

[22]  U.S.DepartmentofStateOfficeoftheCoordinatorforCoun.  Patterns of Global Terrorism:1995 , 1996 .

[23]  Walter Enders,et al.  Terrorism: Theory and applications , 1995 .

[24]  Martha Crenshaw,et al.  Why Violence SpreadsThe Contagion of International Terrorism , 1980 .

[25]  The western alliance and the challenge of combating terrorism , 1997 .

[26]  Richard Clutterbuck.  Terrorism in an Unstable World , 1994 .

[27]  Economic Methodology Applied to Political Hostage-Taking in Light of the Iran-Contra Affair , 1989 .

[28]  Keeping track of terrorists after 1992 , 1992 .

[29]  EU counter‐terrorism, the Maastricht third pillar and liberal democratic acceptability , 1994 .

[30]  James D. Hamilton.  Time Series Analysis , 1994 .

[31]  A. Jongman,et al.  Trends in international and domestic terrorism in Western Europe, 1968–1988 , 1992 .

[32]  Meliton Cardona.  The European response to terrorism , 1992 .