Abstract
Introduction
On September 11, 2001, a group of well-organized, fanatical terrorists, allegedly associated with Osama Bin Laden’s Islamic extremist network, Al Qaeda, high jacked four passenger planes filled with innocent and unsuspecting civilians, and subsequently crashed the planes, thus wreaking havoc and unspeakable human carnage on America that far exceeded that from the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. At 9:02 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into a wing of the Pentagon destroying an entire section of the building. Only the heroic actions of some of the passengers on a fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, prevented another high-value target from suffering the same fate as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (9/11 Commission Report).
America was shocked and grief-stricken, and rightly so. At no other time in our history had we suffered such a devastating attack within our borders. Among the profound implications of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 is the fact that America needed considerably greater public policy attention to protect the homeland and provide a focused governmental policy concerning counterterrorism and strategic response to emergency situations. The most notable government reactions to 9/11 were the following. First, within just weeks of the attacks, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, which is actually an acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” (P.L. 107–56). Essentially, the USA Patriot Act provided enhanced law enforcement investigatory tools to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world. Congress subsequently created the Department of Homeland Security through the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-296). This new cabinet-level agency was created through the integration of all or part of 22 different federal departments and agencies. In principle, this new, comprehensive homeland security and law enforcement agency is supposed to improve communication and intelligence gathering across the different functional areas, including terrorism.
Terrorism, especially since 9/11, has thus come to occupy a central place in government policy (both domestically and globally) and has had concomitant effects on military activity, economic and regional development, and surely the everyday lives of citizens in many countries—especially the United States. There are now seemingly countless and varied sources of information on terrorism from researchers across numerous academic disciplines and research centers (see for example, http://library.columbia.edu/indiv/lehman/guides/terrorism.html). Moreover, a recent article by Sinai (2012) reviews the top 150 books on terrorism and counterterrorism. However, research on terrorism in criminology and criminal justice has not been accorded significant scholarly attention as compared with other fields. This special issue is an effort to raise the awareness of criminology and criminal justice researchers concerning the range of terrorism issues that can be investigated and the databases that are available to support this pursuit.
The article by Deloughery, King, and Asal addresses an important conceptual issue concerning the parallels between the study of hate crimes and terrorism. The article shows that prior research has largely neglected key differences between these two behaviors. The key differences between hate crimes and acts of terrorism form the backdrop for the research, which empirically investigates the association between the two. The article contributes to prior work on hate crimes and terrorism in two respects. First, it emphasizes the temporal association between these behaviors. Second, the research empirically investigates the potential for one kind of violent event to trigger another kind of violence.
Deloughery, King, and Asal utilize two data sources to conduct time-series analyses. First, the data on hate crimes come from the annual FBI incident-level hate crime files. The collection of these data was mandated by the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-275), which required the United States attorney general to collect data “about crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.” The data file covers the years 1992 to 2008 and includes information on 131,286 hate crime incidents, which are organized by week and by day. Second, the data on terrorism come from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). The GTD is an open-source database of terrorist attacks from around the globe (see LaFree & Dugan, 2007, for a detailed description). Deloughery, King, and Asal restrict the analytic sample to terror attacks that take place on U.S. soil between 1992 and 2008 to correspond with the available information on hate crimes. Although the GTD contains information on both domestic and international attacks, only domestic incidents are used (i.e., 505 terror attacks occurred in the United States).
Deloughery, King, and Asal offer three important conclusions about the relationship between hate crimes and terrorism. First, they find no evidence to suggest that hate crimes are a precursor to future terrorism. Second, hate crimes are often perpetrated in response to terrorist acts. Third, the latter association is particularly strong for hate crimes perpetrated against minority groups after a non-right-wing terrorist attack, particularly attacks on symbols of core American ideals, indicating that some hate crimes may essentially constitute expressions of retaliation.
The article by LaFree and Morris addresses a highly significant topic concerning the underlying context of terrorism—the perceived legitimacy of and attitudes toward U.S. policy. They demonstrate that recent public opinion surveys in predominantly Muslim countries report declining support for U.S. government and policy, as well as increasing support for Muslim-based groups that attack the United States. In this context, LaFree and Morris examine whether perceptions about the legitimacy of the U.S. government may also be related to support for anti-American transnational terrorist attacks. They use data from more than 3,600 face-to-face interviews with respondents from three Muslim countries (Egypt, Indonesia, and Morocco) to examine important correlates of terrorism. These three countries are among those with the highest percentage of Muslim citizens in the world but are also extremely diverse in terms of history, politics, and culture. First, they examine the effects of support for the American government, people, and culture on parallel support for Muslim-based groups that attack Americans. Second, they also examine the effects of perceived domestic institutional legitimacy on support for Muslim-based groups that attack Americans.
LaFree and Morris report findings that are important in their own right, and also important for the cultivation of greater support in the Muslim world for antiterrorism policy. First, they found that individuals who have more favorable attitudes toward American citizens and culture are less likely to support attacks against Americans by Muslim-based groups. Second, they also found that perceived legitimacy in one’s own political institutions, including government, police, and the criminal justice system, is associated with lower levels of support for groups that attack Americans. These findings have important implications for further research and policy.
The article by Roberts, Roberts, and Liedka focuses on a crucial follow-up issue that surely arises in light of the 9/11 terrorist attacks—the extent to which the preparedness of local police agencies to respond to terrorism may be affected by structural features surrounding organizational and environmental characteristics. Specifically, these characteristics include presence of terrorism special units, assignment of dedicated terrorism personnel, terrorism-related community outreach, use of computerized intelligence files, and interagency shared radio frequencies. Roberts, Roberts, and Liedka use the Bureau of Justice Statistics Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) data files from 2007, with the 2003 LEMAS data providing baseline measures of preparedness. They focus 374 on medium- and large-sized agencies (serving populations of 100,000 or more), because smaller agencies are likely to eschew formal planning and special units in favor of ad hoc reliance on community resources in times of crisis.
This study extends existing research on terrorism preparedness in four important ways. These include (a) examination of a period that is long enough after 9/11 for influences on the new wave of terrorism preparedness to be apparent, (b) multivariate analysis in data of national scope, (c) analysis of separate elements of preparedness rather than only an overall measure, and (d) use of an objective measure of vulnerability to terrorism as a predictor of preparedness. While some prior studies have shared some of these features, none have had all of them.
One important result of this study is that the modeling of 2007 preparedness revealed both consistencies and some differences in the associations between these measures and the different preparedness elements. Another finding showed no association between an agency’s objective vulnerability score and terrorism preparedness actions. These results warrant further research attention. Further follow-up research is clearly needed to extend this study beyond the 2007 period to examine the extent to which agency preparedness has been affected by the recent period of economic recession that has likely had significant impacts on agency budgets.
Savage and Nellis provide another example of the use of survey methods to examine fundamental aspects of terrorism. They investigate the extent to which the media can elevate perceptions of risk and fear of terrorism. They draw on previous research concerning fear of crime, which has examined (a) overall amount of media consumption, (b) resonance of news reports, (c) how much attention the individual pays to the news, and (d) how credible he or she believes it to be. The present study examines whether these same media issues pertain to terrorism. The study used a telephone survey of New Yorkers and Washingtonians to test whether perceived risk and fear of terrorism are associated with several media-related variables. A total of 532 interviews were obtained from adults (18 and older) living in the metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) of New York City and Washington, D.C. These areas were selected to achieve adequate variability in the measures of the resonance of terrorism-related news because these were the sites of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
It is important to note that the Savage and Nellis research produced results that were consistent in several ways with the fear of crime literature but depart from typical fear of crime findings in important ways, too. First, females report greater fear of terrorism and judge the risk of terrorism to be significantly higher than males do. Second, similar to findings from fear of crime studies, older participants were less worried about terrorism (for themselves but not their families) but did not perceive the risk of future attacks to be lower than younger participants. Third, race was significantly related to terrorism fear and risk; Whites rated the likelihood of a future terrorist attack to be significantly lower than minorities and were less fearful of an attack. Last, victimization predicted both perceived risk of terrorism and fear of terrorism.
The Savage and Nellis study also investigated specific hypotheses related to media and terrorism perception. It was found that overall exposure to TV news was associated with three of the four dependent variables. Frequency of exposure was associated with greater fear for one’s family, greater personal perceived risk of terrorism, and greater risk of terrorism to others. The implications of this study are clear. The authors note the following two juxtaposed issues. First, if the media are conveying an accurate depiction of terrorist activity, and individuals are using rational calculation to estimate risk of terrorist attacks, then the positive relationship between TV news exposure and perceived risk and fear is an understandable outcome. Second, however, if the media are sensationalizing or exaggerating terrorism stories, this may be heightening the perceptions of risk and fear in the population as a whole. There are serious policy implications that could stem from this: If objective conditions are inflated by media hype and that leads to elevated fears among viewers, there exists a risk of endorsing support for overly punitive policies and restrictions on civil liberties that might not otherwise be supported. This study offers a first look at these important relationships among media exposure, terrorism fear, and perceived risk of terrorism.
James Forest, the special editor of this issue, examines whether the ideology of a terrorist group has a meaningful impact on its involvement in kidnapping. This topic is stimulated by the fact that incident data between 1970 to 2010 show that, in the past decade, the number of kidnappings by terrorist groups has increased, while Muslim extremists have replaced left-wing/Marxist revolutionaries as the world’s leading kidnappers.
Forest uses a combination of data sources to examine this issue. First, he uses the GTD. The GTD incident data suggest a relationship between ideology and terrorist group involvement in kidnapping. The GTD is an event database from which one can only draw inferences about specific terrorist group behaviors. However, because Forest must still determine (a) the proclivity for kidnapping among terrorist organizations across ideological categories and (b) the relative importance of ideology among other organizational attributes, Forest necessarily required a different kind of data. One excellent such source is the Big Allied and Dangerous Data (BAAD) developed by Asal and Rethemeyer (2008). The BAAD includes data on 395 organizations of varying size, ideological orientations and capabilities (among other attributes), and is a numerical version of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism semantic database (MIPT, 2006), which is a precursor to the Terrorist Organization Profiles (TOPS) terrorist group profiles. Combining the two data sources (GTD incidents and BAAD organizational attributes) allows for the type of analysis needed to explore the kidnapping and ideology issues of concern to Forest.
The Forest article yields some very important findings. First, his results do not support the hypothesis that ideological orientation has a statistically significant effect on a terrorist group’s propensity to kidnap. Instead, his analysis found that an organization’s size is a key factor in its propensity for kidnapping, and may in fact be central to the strategic, tactical, or operational decisions the organization makes. He also found that a terrorist group’s network alliances were a more significant contributing factor than ideology, perhaps because of the diverse range of knowledge and logistical capabilities needed for complex terrorist operations like kidnapping. Overall, the Forest article suggests that as a driving factor in terrorist group decision making, the importance of ideology may in some instances be exaggerated. The study shows in the alternative that a specific group’s financial needs, leadership, operating environment, or any number of other organizational variables are far more powerful influences on the group’s propensity to kidnap.
The final article by Holt and Kilger explores the factors that may affect an individual’s willingness to use technology to attack critical infrastructure on- or off-line. The authors suggest that there is a prospective linkage between politically motivated behaviors on- and off-line, ranging from acts of nonviolent resistance to extreme acts of violence against civilian and government targets. Consequently, they investigate the factors that may drive individual willingness to engage in violent political action on- or off-line, and the similarities that may exist across these environments. The article attempts to (a) differentiate the relationships that may be evident in the predictors of both nonviolent and violent activities in physical and virtual action and (b) determine how the target of an act, whether foreign or domestic, affects willingness to engage in various physical and virtual political activities. The data for this study were generated from a self-report survey administered to undergraduate and graduate students at a large midwestern university in the spring of 2010 using an online survey instrument.
Holt and Kilger found that few individuals were willing to engage in serious acts of violence in the real world and attacks against critical infrastructure in cyberspace against either their home country or a foreign nation. The findings also suggest that nationalism and patriotism have a relatively limited affect on individual willingness to engage in cyber attacks and physical protests. The results also show strong support for the idea that patriotic ideals appear to only influence letter-writing behavior in the real world. Instead, individuals who do not support the suppression of minority and out-groups in society were more willing to engage in multiple attacks against their home nation and forms of nonviolent action in the real world. The findings also indicate that social attitudes may vary across virtual and real environments, in keeping with the larger literature on the contextual nature of violence and terror. The article also discusses the implications for policy makers, governmental agencies, and law enforcement concerning the relationship between on- and off-line infrastructure attacks.
Terrorism Research
Another goal of this introductory article is to familiarize readers with the possibilities of further research on terrorism. First, the available public use data sources are identified and compared. Second, descriptive data from the GTD are provided to show the range of issues that might fruitfully be pursued in the future.
Terrorism Databases
There are several public use databases that represent useful resources for terrorism research. Our readers are encouraged to consult these databases for rich data files that can support a wide array of empirical inquiries into terrorism, both historically and since the 9/11 attacks.
RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents (RDWTI)
The RAND Corporation, through its National Security Research Division, has been involved in the study of terrorism for four decades prior to the 9/11 attacks. The RAND involvement in terrorism research began in 1972, shortly after the terrorist attacks at the Munich Olympics and the Red Army attack on Lod Airport in Israel. In response to these attacks, President Nixon (1972) formed the first official government body charged with fighting terrorism, Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=3596#axzz1yjiqtFIJ). This Committee asked the RAND Corporation to examine recent trends in terrorism, prompting a team of RAND analysts to begin development of a database—the first of its kind—known initially as the RAND Terrorism Chronology (http://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/terrorism-incidents/about.html). RAND indicated that
The Federal government imported RAND’s database in the 1980s and built on it from there. RAND continued to develop the original and to use it, along with a parallel compilation of detailed case studies, to describe terrorism empirically so that the phenomenon could be systematically analyzed. As the database grew and evolved, it became an increasingly valuable tool for discerning trends in terrorist tactics and targeting and other developments. The database enabled RAND to inform government policymakers on how terrorists made decisions, managed their violent attacks and manipulated fear; how they viewed hostage situations and bargained in them, and how they viewed nuclear weapons; and what resources they were able to mobilize. To cite just a few examples, RAND analyses helped shape the first instructions to American officials going into high-risk posts, and informed the design and construction of diplomatic facilities abroad and the formulation of nuclear security measures in the United States, (http://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/terrorism-incidents/about.html)
The RDWTI contains data on more than 36,000 incidents spanning the years 1972 through 2009. The database was based on the conduct of extensive research on candidate terrorist attacks, drawing on RAND staff with regional expertise, relevant language skills, and in-country fieldwork experience (http://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/terrorism-incidents.html). The RDWTI provides the following variables: (a) date, (b) region, (c) country, (d) perpetrator, (e) tactic, (f) weapon, (g) target, (h) suicide attack, (i) domestic versus international incident, (j) fatalities, and (k) injuries.
It is without argument that RAND has thus been at the forefront of terrorism and counterterrorism research for approximately 40 years—long before the 9/11 attacks stimulated widespread interest in this topic. RAND suggests that the RDWTI “is widely regarded as the gold standard for comprehensive information on international and domestic terrorism” (http://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/terrorism-incidents.html). However, it must be noted that the RDWTI has the following serious limitation:
Prior to 1998, the database includes only international terrorism incidents (see Database Scope). Beginning with 1998, the database includes both domestic and international incidents, greatly increasing the number of incidents in these years. This change in coverage must be considered when examining chronological charts, which would otherwise appear to show an enormous increase in terrorism incidents beginning in 1998. A more valid view of trends in the number of incidents could be had by, for instance, filtering the search to include only international incidents. (http://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/terrorism-incidents/search_instructions.html)
GTD
The GTD is maintained by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland. The GTD originated in 2001 when researchers at the University of Maryland obtained a large database originally collected by the Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services (PGIS). The GTD website as well as two publications by the Director provide excellent details on the history of the GTD and the development of the database (see, http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/; LaFree, et al., 2006; LaFree and Dugan. 2007), consequently, we only need provide major highlights here.
The GTD database was originally developed by trained researchers at PGIS and covered the years 1970 to 1997. These staff were tasked with the identification and recording of terrorism incidents from wire services, government reports, and major international newspapers to assess the risk of terrorism for PGIS. The University of Maryland Researchers obtained funding from the National Institute of Justice, and finished computerizing the original Pinkerton data in December 2005, making corrections and adding additional information wherever possible (http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/about/). At various points thereafter, START collaborated with other organizations to continually update the GTD. These organizations include the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS) and the Institute for the Study of Violent Groups (ISVG) at the University of New Haven. The GTD is a compilation of distinct data collection efforts from 1970 to the present (http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/about/History.aspx).
The GTD is an open-source database and includes information on terrorist events around the world from 1970 through 2010 with the exception of 1993 for which the data were lost by PGIS. Unlike many other event databases, the GTD includes systematic data on domestic as well as transnational and international terrorist incidents that have occurred during this time period and now includes more than 98,000 cases. For each GTD incident, information is available on the date and location of the incident, the weapons used and nature of the target, the number of casualties, and the group or individual responsible (http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/about/). The GTD has important characteristics that make it a highly valuable resource for research on terrorism:
data on more than 98,000 terrorist attacks
most comprehensive unclassified database on terrorist events in the world
information on more than 43,000 bombings, 14,000 assassinations, and 4,700 kidnappings since 1970
includes information on at least 45 variables for each case, with more recent incidents including information on more than 120 variables
supervised by an advisory panel of 12 terrorism research experts
more than 3,500,000 news articles and 25,000 news sources reviewed to collect incident data from 1998 to 2010 alone (http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/about/)
Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS)
The third major terrorism database is the WITS. This database is under the auspices of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). NCTC was a federal agency established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. NCTC was established by Executive Order 13354 (http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/executive-orders/2004.html) in August 2004, and then codified by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (P.L. 108-458). NCTC was created to implement one of the key recommendations of the 9/11 Commission: “Breaking the older mold of national government organizations, this NCTC should be a center for joint operational planning and joint intelligence, staffed by personnel from the various agencies” (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2004, p. 403).
The WITS database includes 73,866 incidents covering the period from January 1, 2005, through December 31, 2010. The WITS database allows users to search and display terrorist incidents by the following major categories: (a) region and country, (b) date, (c) perpetrator characteristics, (d) victim type and characteristics, and (e) facility type characteristics and damage.
Future Terrorism Studies
Crime & Delinquency very much appreciates James Forest’s effort to compile this group of terrorism articles from many leading researchers in the field. It is our hope that our readers will benefit from the efforts of the authors of this issue as a stimulus to further research on terrorism. To this end, we provide below some descriptive data from the GTD along with suggestions for future research efforts.
Global Terrorism Trends
Figure 1 reports the worldwide terrorism incidents in the GTD by year. The trend clearly shows that terrorism incidents rose annually (except for a few atypical dips) from 1970 to 1992. Terrorism incidents then fell from 1992 to 1998. After a short period of instability (1999-2004), the incidents rose steadily between 2004 and 2008. Since the GTD allows analysis of terrorism data by region, and even further by countries within region, there are numerous research investigations that need to be undertaken to investigate comparative trends in terrorism across designated areas of the world. We suggest that it would be fruitful for researchers to combine the GTD data, with other global databases that would greatly expand the explanatory and contextual variables available to study global terrorism trends, and also by region or country.
Global terrorism incidents: 1970-2010
One such database is the KOF Index of Globalization (see Dreher, 2006; Dreher, Gaston, & Martens, 2008) maintained by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute. The Index of Globalization measures the three main dimensions of globalization: (a) economic, (b) social, and (c) political. In addition to three indices measuring these dimensions, KOF calculates an overall index of globalization and subindices referring to (a) actual economic flows, (b) economic restrictions, (c) data on information flows, (d) data on personal contact, and (e) data on cultural proximity. The KOF Index has data available on a yearly basis for 208 countries over the period 1970 to 2009 (http://globalization.kof.ethz.ch/). Another global index that might be used to expand the explanatory power of terrorism data is the Corruption Perceptions Index compiled by Transparency International (http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/). The Corruption Perception Index measures the perceived levels of public sector corruption in 183 countries and territories around the world. The Index is available annually since 1995.
Terrorism Characteristics
As noted above, the GTD contains a number of variables that can be used to examine a range of important topics concerning terrorism incidents. Tables 1 to 4 below confirm that the GTD data contains sufficient variation across these terrorism characteristics for meaningful analyses. It is hoped that criminologists will recognize the great potential in merging the GTD with notable global indices to enhance the explanatory power of the data.
Terrorist Events by Region: 1970-2010
Terrorist Events by Weapon Type: 1970-2010
Terrorist Events by Attack Type: 1970-2010
Terrorist Events by Target Type: 1970-2010
For example, Table 1 indicates that there are substantial terrorism incidents in many of the world’s regions. One can imagine all sorts of interesting research studies across regions and also country-level analyses within regions. Such analyses could examine terrorism trends across time to test the stability of time-series models across the world or, in the alternative, explore regional or country specific trends that warrant further research. Similarly, the descriptive data shown in Tables 2 to 4 indicate that the GTD contains sufficient data on major terrorism characteristics, like weapons used, type of attack, or type or targets, to permit further important analyses of terrorism. As above, one can imagine studies that examine these characteristics over time, regionally, by country, or even by terrorist organization. Clearly, the GTD is a rich data resource that has sufficient cases and contextual variables to support a host of important terrorism studies. It is hoped that this special issue provides some impetus to the field to develop such research agendas.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.