Introduction

For the past hundreds of years, the World has suffered globalized terrorist attacks that had considerable consequences on citizen’s life all around the world. At different time periods, some continents have been impacted by a lot of terrorist attacks due to conflictual situations (Western Europe and Africa during the last decades, Ireland and the UK between the 70's and the ‘90s, South America and Asia during the communist-socialist era). Those terrorists attacks have different goals (religious, political, ideological) but they always impact the life of the citizen of the country/city that they target. Today, not only will we present to you the bare truth about terrorism in our globalized world during the last 50 years (and not just what the media wants you to hear!) but we will also present you with few insights found alongside our study and observation of those terror attacks dataset.

What motivates us to give such a detailed analysis of global terrorism over the last century is that according to us there are lessons to be learned from the past. In our opinion studying patterns in terror attacks and groups can help to understand them better and take some safety measures, observing the real data of terrorism and its impact on the everyday life of a worldwide citizen is also as informative as helpful to get rid of the irrational fear one can have. To finish with, we tried to “predict” from past data how some countries are linked in regards to global terrorism, this helped us “predict” a following attack occurring in a country if a linked country has been attacked just before. Indeed, we are not going to pretend that we have found ways to prevent a terrorist attack to ever happen again, but if our study can reduce this impact or prevent some of those disasters to occur, even if people just feel more informed about it. Then, we will have reached our goal.

Datasets

In this project, we used data from many sources. The main part of our analysis is done with the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) which is a database of terrorist incidents from 1970 onward. As of July 2017, the list extended through 2016, with an incomplete data of 1993 due to issues with that year. The database is maintained by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, College Park in the United States. We also had a look on terrorist groups using the Extended Data on Terrorist Groups (EDTG), an extended data set of 760 terrorist groups that were engaged in attacks during 1970 to 2016. EDTG is linked to terrorist groups and attacks given in the Global Terrorism Database. Terrorist groups’ variables in EDTG include ideology, main goals, start date, duration, base country, attack diversity, peak size, alternative endings (if relevant), and others. Data about Happiness come from the World Happiness Report, a landmark survey of the state of global happiness that ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be. Finally, we used the Fragile States Index (FSI) produced by The Fund for Peace (FFP), which is a critical tool in highlighting not only the normal pressures that all states experience, but also in identifying when those pressures are outweighing a states’ capacity to manage them.

  • 48 Number of years
  • 163,582 Number of Attacks
  • 334,211 Number of Kills
  • 205 Number of Countries
  • 3429 Number of Groups

Overall Analysis

In this first section, we will be presenting the studied dataset as well as some of the interesting insights we found inside.

Firstly, we are trying to find a correlation between tourism and terrorism. After observing general trends, we decided to focus on touristic data from 2010 to 2018 in Metropolitan France for its regularity and periodicity. We can see a repeating pattern with a steady increase in the tourist flow each year. When France suffered a period of intense terrorist activity from 2015 to 2016 (Bataclan : 130 kills, Nice : 86 kills). There is a sudden drop in tourist arrivals, followed by the same steady increase as the years go by and people forget.

Tourist Arrivals in France

Happiness index and fragility state index in world map

Next, we decided to find some correlation (and not causation) between terrorism data and the quality of life, in the most affected countries. In order to do so, we compared it to two different indexes that as far as we are concerned seems to embed well the problematics linked to terrorism in our everyday life. Hence why we chose the Happiness and Fragility state indexes for each country. Let us introduce each index first.

The happiness index is a measure of the perceived happiness of citizens published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network each year since 2011. Data is collected from people in over 150 countries and is computed as a weighted sum of variables on a scale running from 0 to 10 that is tracked over time and compared against other countries. These variables currently include the real GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption (source : Wikipédia).

As expected, there is an inverse correlation between the number of terror attacks in a country and its happiness index. We would like to propose as an explaination that people may feel less certain and confident in the future as well as terrorist groups are usually coming from disappointed and disillusioned groups of people. Since those attacks result in death, they may impact life expectancy of those people (even though the number is not significant in regard to the population size in most cases). In addition to that, we could not really find a correlation with the GDP so we think it mostly linked with populations’ spirits.

Now that we showed that “Happy” countries are de facto less subject to terrorist attacks. It could be interesting to observe any possible correlation between terrorism and states' fragility. Intuitively it would seem that the happiness of citizens is directly correlated to society's fragility. This fragility is measured with the Fragility State Index which is an annual report published by the United States think tank, the Fund for Peace and the American magazine Foreign Policy from 2005 to 2018, then by The New Humanitarian since 2019. The list aims to assess states' vulnerability to conflict or collapse, ranking all sovereign states with membership in the United Nations where there is enough data available for analysis. To construct this measure, twelve conflict risk indicators are used to capture the condition of a state at any given moment. These risk indicators are the following : Security Apparatus, Factionalized Elites, Group Grievance, Economic Decline and Property, Uneven Economic Development, Human Flight and Brain Drain, State Legitimacy, Public Services, Human Rights and Rule of Law, Demographic Pressures, Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons andExternal Intervention.

Once again we are presented with an obvious inverse correlation. The number of terrorist attacks seems to be correlated with the fragility of a country. Indeed, the more fragile a country is, the greater the number of attacks seems to be (Egypt, India, Iraq, Syria,...). Whereas countries with a very low fragility state index (such as Norway, Sweden, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) do not have terrorist many attacks.

To conclude this general study, we could say that more fragile and less “happy” countries(usually Southern ones) seem to be the target of more frequent and deadly attacks. Nevertheless, those are usually not the attacks that the media cover the most.

Terrorist Groups

After seeing the correlations between terrorism and societal behaviour, we will focus our analysis on terrorist groups. In the following section, we used The Extended Data on Terrorist Groups (EDTG) which gives many pieces of information about terrorist groups since 1970. In order to characterise those groups, we constructed a terrorist group network based on :

  • The group’s motivation: Does it seek an empire, regime-change or social revolution goal? Or does it seek a policy change goal? The last possible goals are seeking either a status quo or a territorial change.
  • The group’s ideology: Can it be characterised as a right-wing group, a left-wing group, a nationalist group or a religious group?
  • The countries it targeted.

Network of Terrorist groups

Observing the graph, three main clusters (highly linked) stand out in the middle of many "isolated" nodes in pink. These isolated nodes cannot be linked to the other because they appear in a local context (Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist-Leninist or Zimbabwe African Nationalist Union for example) and their targets are also isolated. Unlike the clusters, which can be classified as follows :

  • The independentist and religious groups of North Africa and Middle East (Al-Qaida, Kata'ib Hezbollah,...), coloured in green.
  • The left-wing revolutionary movements against the actual regime (Red Army Faction, Red Brigades, Action Directe, ...), coloured in red.
  • The regional independentist groups (Basque Fatherland Freedom, Irish Republican Army and Bodo Liberation Tigers), coloured in orange.

Evolutions of groups

In order to clarify our observation of terrorist groups around the world, we wanted to analyse the evolution of the ideology and motivation of those groups over time. This can help us be more cautious about what kind of political or ideological disagreement are more at risk. We also thought that there might exist certain “eras” of terrorism based on the geopolitical and historical context.

As observed on the ideology graph, the number of religious and nationalist (independentist) groups have boomed since 1985 whereas left-winged and right-winged groups remain stable. On one hand, we have seen a rise of religious group, mostly coming from Africa and Asia due to the rise of jihadist/political claim, results of occidental imperialism in those countries as well as a rise in nationalist groups thanks to the decolonisation and the fall of the USSR. On the other hand, in developed countries, there are more politically affiliated groups, their proportion is quite stable with a more numerous and violent left-winged groups (revolutionary movement).

When looking at the motivation of those groups, we can see that the majority of them seeks either a change of regime or a territorial change (mostly independentists). This seems to be coherent with the religious -mainly political jihad, whose goals are to change the governing regime to Islamic state- and nationalist groups seeking territorial changes. We have fewer of the other groups.

Focus on Global North Countries

On the global plot describing the number of attacks and killed due to terrorism. We can observe that terrorist waves are usually preceded by a historical event, or we can at least follow the impact of geopolitical context on terrorism. As an example we could talk about:

  • In Northern Ireland and in Spain during the ‘70s, there is a lot of protest against the government as well as a rise of independentist movement (ETA in Spain, IRA, and others in Ireland). The “Troubles” and Spanish transition to democracy are followed by not so bloody but very long wave of terrorist attacks.
  • As explained beforehand, we have seen that countries are against occidental imperialism. Thus, as a consequence of the Gulf War, there is a rise in killed and attacks.
  • In 2001 with the infamously World Trade Center attack, we peaked on the number of killed. This is a consequence of the rise of Islamic groups opposed to US imperialism, those groups usually do not strike very often in Northern country but they are very deadly (Madrid, London) in the 2000’s.
  • In 2011, started the Lybian civil war in which international coalition constituted of Northern and Western countries this led to a new deadly wave of terrorist attacks.

Analysis of groups

Let's take a closer look at the 5 most deadly terrorist groups in Northern countries.

First of all, it is interesting to notice the intersection of 3 groups between the list of the groups with the greatest number of attacks and the list of the groups with the highest number of killed. Indeed, the Irish Republic Army (IRA), the Basque Fatherland and Freedom (ETA) and the Chechens Rebels all appear in both lists. Moreover, we observe similar trends in the evolution of the number of attacks and kills of all these groups. IRA and ETA have a very long activity period, with some fluctuation but a very stable number of attacks even though some political events are followed by an increase in the number of attacks. The goal of these groups is to fight against the actual policy and to get regional independence or unification. In the same fashion, the Chechen Rebels are also fighting for their independence in a crisis context after the fall of the Soviet bloc and continue a century-long conflict against the Russian government. Another interesting fact is the absence of the Corsican National Liberation Front in deadliest groups list. As a matter of fact, their goal is to intimidate rather than to kill. The case of The Donetsk People’s Republic, a proto-state in the Donetsk Oblast of Ukraine is too complex for us and we let the analysis to the specialists - this group is not always considered a terrorist group and we do not want to give our opinion on this matter. Last but not least, Al Qaida stands out with the most deadly attacks. Using a new form of terrorism, focused on high-density zone and in particular in transportations medium, they realize some of the most murderess attacks in the story of the terrorism. A tragic example is the World Trade Center with almost 3’000 kills.

Learning From The Past

The most Important terrorist groups (in terms of the number of attacks) tend to target more than one country. We can suppose that these targets are not randomly chosen. Since terrorism serves a political purpose, we can suppose that two countries that have been targeted by the same terrorist group are linked. To visually observe these links, we decided to create a bipartite graph between terrorist groups and the targeted countries. We then do a projection of this graph on the country side.


The graphs above give an overview of the links that exist between countries for different time periods. Feel free to explore the interactive graph. Now that we know that we have the capability to create this type of graph, we can use it to extract some valuable insights. If a country has been attacked, can we predict another upcoming attack on another country? We try to answer this question by using data before 2010 to predict attacks between 2011 and 2018. We first create a graph with the data before 2010 in which we exclude all the week edges (less than 10 connections). Therefore, we can suppose that the graph below represents meaningful relations between countries. We observe some clusters appear in function of the region, which is an indicator that the links represent real connections.


The next step will be to see if the countries that have been attacked after 2010 have the same kind edges. The goal is not to predict the next attack but we can suppose that if a country is attacked there is a higher chance that a connected country will also be attacked. The graph of the data after 2010 is presented below. In this graph, we want to keep all the connections because all the attacks are equally important.


This graph has more connections since we keep all the nodes. To evaluate the quality of the previous links, we want to know how many edges are in common between the previous graph and this one. We observe that 85% of the edges that were present in the past are still present now. Even if we can not say anything about attacks in new countries, there is indeed a higher chance that a country that shares a link with a recently attacked country will also be the target of a new attack. This can help linked countries to be better prepare for an attack and hopefully prevent it.

Mini Quiz

Now, time to test your knowledge about geopolitics all around the world and to see if you have been a careful reader of our data story.



Conclusion

Terrorism can take various forms and has been displayed in many different geopolitical contexts. Therefore, it is a highly complex subject that cannot be explained easily. Nevertheless, with our analysis, we tried to make things clearer. To begin with, a first descriptive analysis allowed us to find correlations between terrorism and societal behaviors. As a consequence, we successfully illustrated one of the most important consequences of terrorism is to establish a crisis climate and spread fear amongst the population. The next analysis is more focused on terrorist groups. Then, we tried to find some recurrent patterns, in particular, in the groups’ origin and operation mode (weapons, attack types, targets). We also categorized groups in four categories of motivations and four categories of ideology, in order to observe the evolution of these categories over time. From those observations, we were able to some extent, to understand the prevailing opposing ideologies and motivation worldwide since 1970. For a deeper analysis, we focused on global terrorism in Northern countries, we analyzed in detail 6 groups which marked the History of Northern and Western countries: making deadly, violent, destructive and frequent attacks on their territory. Finally, we ended our analysis by trying to come with a tool able to “predict” similarly targeted countries. Thus, we created a network of countries sadly linked by their terrorism story. The goal of this network is to prevent attacks in highly connected countries of a targeted country, by enforcing more security measures as well as individual safety precautions when attacks occur in a linked country. To conclude with, terrorism is a vast and interesting subject to understand, even though it confronts some of our deepest fear. We do believe that this knowledge is power and that it might be our only weapon against generalized ignorance and globalized violence.