Phu Vo ECON 120: Economics of Crime April 09, 2026 Paper 5: Global Terror Statistics From 1970- 2019
For Project 5, I looked at global terrorism data from 1970-2019. One issue with accurate data presentation was the need to reassign former territories to certain countries of today. This could be due to issues such as conjoined countries (Czechoslovakia's data as Czechia, or Slovakia) or contested territories (the West Bank as the Palestinian territories or Israel). The project covers global terrorism concentration, geographical and historical terrorism change, and variations in attack types across regions.
The data used comes from the Global Terrorism Database, which compiles detailed overviews of over 200,000 recorded incidents and suspected terrorist activities around the globe (Miller et. al, 2020). Variables for analysis include the number of attacks (count), geographic identifiers (country, province, state), region classification, incident year, and attack type categories. To compare terrorism patterns across geographic areas and temporal spans, raw counts were transformed into proportional measures (percentages of total attacks) so that patterns reflect relative concentration rather than absolute volume for certain visualizations.
The initial data-viz shows the distribution of terrorist incidents between 1970-2019 at the provincial/state level through a packed bubble chart. Each bubble corresponds to a specific area, with its size determined by the total number of recorded attacks and color representing its broader geographic region. Larger bubbles indicate higher concentrations of terrorist activity. The bubbles are also organized into rings by region, where inner rings represent regions with greater activity and outer rings represent regions with lower activity. There is a strong clustering of incidents in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) and South Asia regions, with provinces such as Baghdad, Iraq, and Sindh, Pakistan appearing prominently near the center. These regions have longstanding political instability and may have ongoing conflicts and insurgencies. The dense clustering of smaller bubbles surrounding these central nodes further suggests that terrorism is not evenly distributed even within high-risk countries, but rather concentrated in specific localities. It suggests that violence is clustered in areas with weak institutional control.
The second visualization uses an area chart to examine the change in the geographic distribution of terrorism over time. The chart shows the percentage of total global attacks attributable to each region annually, represented by colors and proportion. In the early 70s, Western Europe took on the greatest share of global terrorism, largely due to ethno-nationalist movements like “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Over time, the shares of attacks in Europe declined significantly, while MENA and South Asia grew in prominence. By the 2000s and 2010s, these regions became the dominant sites of global terrorism distribution. These shifts reflect broader historical and geopolitical changes, such as the Cold War’s impact on Latin America from the 80s to the 90s. While the above cases do include poorer countries, as discussed in class, research suggests that there is no consistent link between economic conditions and terrorist behavior. Alan B. Krueger’s work, What Makes a Terrorist, similarly finds “no link between economic distress and [participation in] terrorism” (Apuzzo, 2016). Instead, terrorism appears to be influenced by the complexities of political, social, and ideological relationships and the factors that lead them to clash. Changes in terrorism prevalence correspond more closely with geopolitical events rather than global economic trends.
The final visualization examines the types of terrorist attacks in each region by breaking them down into separate categories with a proportional bar chart. Each bar represents a region, segmented into the following categories: armed assault, bombing/explosion, hostage taking, and other less common forms of attack (e.g. hijacking, unarmed assault). Using proportional bars shows that bombing si the most consistent method of terrorism globally, but variations exist across regions. For example, armed assault constitutes a larger share of attacks in Sub-Saharan Africa, while many attacks are made on facilities in East Asia, potentially because of ethnic separatism movements such as Xinjiang and other autonomous regions of China. Different attack types reflect different strategic objectives and organizational capabilities. Bombings may be used to maximize casualties and media attention, while armed assaults could be local conflicts. This aligns with rational choice theory, as perpetrators weigh their expected costs and benefits. Acts of terrorism are shaped by local conditions, and therefore highly context-dependent.
One example of a terrorist attack in North Carolina, carried out as an armed assault, was the 2015 Chapel Hill Shooting. On February 10, Craig Stephen Hicks murdered three Muslim college students at UNC, claiming he did not “have a parking spot” (Neff and Dewan, 2019). Evidence in court later revealed that Hicks had previously expressed hostility towards and threatened his victims, saying “I don’t like the look of you people” (Chappell, 2019). Prosecutors emphasized Hicks previously exhibited escalating aggression and animosity towards his nonwhite neighbors, but despite evidence suggesting implicit bias, the case was unable to meet the legal threshold of hate crime classification (Neff and Dewan, 2019). The NYT article suggests that terrorists have no singular profile, and attempts to identify consistent predictors of radicalization are often incorrect (such as poverty)– backgrounds of individuals involved in terrorism range widely, from people with “violent criminal records” to those who lived in “suburban normality” (Apuzzo, 2016). UNC’s shooting exemplifies this complexity, as Hicks did not fit a clear ideological or socioeconomic profile, and his motivations were rather a combination of personal grievance, bias, and broader hostility towards religion. Simplistic explanations such as poverty and education are insufficient to act as reliable indicators of terrorism, and rational-choice models cannot fully explain why people might commit crimes.
References
Apuzzo, M. (2016, March 27). Who Will Become a Terrorist? Research Yields Few Clues. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/world/europe/mystery-about-who-will-become-aterrorist-defies-clear-answers.html Chappell, B. (2019, June 12). N. C. Man pleads guilty to killing 3 muslim college students; video is played in court. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2019/06/12/731981858/n-c-man-pleads-guilty-to-murdering-3-mus lim-college-students Miller, E., LaFree, G. and Dugan, L. (2020). Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism: Global Terrorism Database. University of Maryland. https://www.start.umd.edu/ Neff, J., & Dewan, S. (2019, June 12). The murderer was full of hate. But did he commit a hate crime? The Marshall Project. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/06/12/the-murderer-was-full-of-hate-but-did-h e-commit-a-hate-crime
Author’s Statement
During the write-up of Project 5, and the creation of the dashboard, no generative AI tools were used to assist with the production of this assignment. All research, writing, and revision were completely and independently done by me to develop foundational writing and research skills.