Terrorism before and after 9/11 – a more dangerous world?

Was 9/11 the opening salvo in a new age of terrorism? Some argue that this act ushered in a more chaotic world. The evidence suggests that the years since 9/11 have been different from those preceding them. Others contend an increased focus on terrorism in the past 15 years is the result of conflating terrorist activity with insurgency. Through this study, the researchers shed light on these claims by analyzing data on domestic and transnational terrorist incidence from 1989 to 2014.

The researchers used data on terror events from the Global Terrorism Database or G-T-D (GTD). The GTD includes approximately 140,000 terrorism events from 1970 to 2014 and is one of the most extensive sources of data on terrorist attacks. The unit of analysis is the country-year; and the data included 194 countries. The dependent variable is a count of terrorist incidents in a given country for each year. They further disaggregated this variable to distinguish international or transnational from domestic terrorist attacks.

The researchers found that after accounting for the prevalence of terrorism in conflict settings, the post-9/11 era is much less terror-prone than the years preceding it. There was also another shift in terrorist activity from predominantly non-Muslim to Muslim majority countries. Prior to 2002, the higher a country’s Muslim population, the less domestic terrorism it tended to experience. Since 2002, this trend has strongly reversed. And finally, interventions into civil conflicts by Western countries are highly correlated with domestic terrorism.

"Terrorism primarily exists within the context of insurgency. The strongest predictor of terrorism within the borders of any given state is the presence of armed conflict, especially for domestic attacks. In addition, it is not just that the balance of terrorism inside and outside areas with active conflict remains tilted toward conflict zones; terrorism incidents outside of warzones in the post-9/11 era have decreased in absolute terms. Further, there was a marked shift in terrorism within predominantly Muslim countries. There is significantly more terrorism – both domestic and international – in predominantly Muslim nations. There is a possibility that the counter-terrorism policies of governments in Muslim majority countries and foreign states are provoking more terrorism than they are preventing. This may be the case for much of the domestic terrorism plaguing many Muslim countries and an obvious area for future work.

Through this study, the researchers intend to put the threat of terrorism in a measured perspective. They hope this effort will spur further analysis and informed debate among scholars, the wider public, and those making policy decisions related to terrorism."