Geometric persistence and distributional trends in worldwide terrorism

TL;DR

This paper develops new geometric and distributional methods to analyze the spatial, temporal, and group-related patterns of worldwide terrorism, revealing persistent geographic hotspots and significant shifts in terrorist group profiles.

Contribution

It introduces innovative metrics and clustering techniques to study terrorism prevalence, group dynamics, and country profiles over time, offering new insights into structural similarities and policy impacts.

Findings

Geographic regions of high terrorist activity are relatively stable over time.

Significant changes in terrorist group distributions are identified at specific times.

Africa exhibits the greatest heterogeneity in terrorist activity patterns.

Abstract

This paper introduces new methods for studying the prevalence of terrorism around the world and over time. Our analysis treats spatial prevalence of terrorism, the changing profile of groups carrying out the acts of terrorism, and trends in how many attacks take place over time. First, we use a time-evolving cluster analysis to show that the geographic distribution of regions of high terrorist activity remains relatively consistent over time. Secondly, we use new metrics, inspired by geometry and probability, to track changes in the distributions of which groups are performing the terrorism. We identify times at which this distribution changes significantly and countries where the time-varying breakdown is most and least homogeneous. We observe startling geographic patterns, with the greatest heterogeneity from Africa. Finally, we use a new implementation of distances between distributions to group countries according to their incidence profiles over time. This analysis can aid in highlighting structural similarities in outbreaks of extreme behavior and the most and least significant public policies in minimizing a country's terrorism.