Countering Terrorism by Martha Crenshaw & Gary LaFree

Author:Martha Crenshaw & Gary LaFree
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Source: Authors’ compilation, based on Global Terrorism Database.

Attributed Attacks and Location (Region and Country)

Figure 5-2 shows the proportion of attributed attacks in terms of the region in which they occurred. For this exercise we have divided the world into twelve different regions (see appendix 5-1 for the countries included in each region). There is tremendous variation in the proportion of attributed attacks by region of the world. We find the largest percentage of attributed attacks in South America (67 percent), Western Europe (62 percent), and Central America and the Caribbean (59 percent) and the smallest percentage in Eastern Europe (5 percent) and Central Asia (6 percent). In other words, in the first set of regions it is easiest to identify group perpetrators and in the second set it is the most difficult.

The high level of attributed attacks in South and Central America and Western Europe may reflect the dominance of a handful of very prominent terrorist organizations in these regions. For example, over time, the most active terrorist organizations in South America were the Shining Path, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army of Colombia (ELN), the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front (FPMR) in Chile, and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) in Peru. These five organizations operating in South America accounted for nearly 10,000 terrorist attacks from 1970 to 2015—over half of all terrorist attacks in South America during this period. In situations where there is only one major group responsible for most of the violence it is likely that both the media and policymakers are more likely to assume that any unclaimed attacks are in reality the work of the dominant group—whether or not this can be demonstrated to be true.

FIGURE 5-2. Attributed and Unattributed Attacks by Region, 1970–2015

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