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This aim of this chapter is to outline the rationale and methodology behind the development of the Global Terrorism Index (GTI), a composite index which attempts to measure the unobserved latent impact of terrorism across 158 countries covering over 99% of the world’s population.

The GTI attempts to capture the multidimensional direct impact of terrorist related violence, in terms of its physical effect, as well as emotional wounds and fear, by attributing a single-weighted average national level score. It is based on the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). This chapter also details selection of the indicators, weighting methodology and method of normalisation.

The GTI aims to be a reference point from which one can further discuss how researchers and the general public collectively define, interpret and contextualise the social, political and economic impact of terrorism.

Certain issues related to the data remain intractable (e.g., missing injury data in the GTD and property damage). The chapter also suggests a number of areas in which the basic index design could be expanded upon.

By presenting the GTI the chapter provides a relative measure of terrorism. Its value rests in the possibility to compare the impact of terrorism between countries and scores, analyse trends over the time and assess the aggregate global impact of terrorism.

Prior to 9/11 criminologists paid relatively little attention to the study of terrorism. In 2004, the authors argued that criminologists had much to offer to advance our understanding of terrorism and urged scholars to conduct such research. This chapter accounts the theoretical and methodological contributions by the field of criminology to terrorist research.

This chapter demonstrates how the study of terrorism has begun to get more attention in various professional settings of criminology. It then reviews applications of criminological theory and methodological advances by criminologist to terrorism research. It ends by describing efforts to build terrorism event databases.

Terrorism-related research has become common at both of the major criminological professional association meetings. Funding for research on terrorism, especially a large program on domestic extremism sponsored by the National Institute of Justice, has contributed to a growing research literature. Academic courses on terrorism have also been added to criminology programs around the country. While the criminological literature on terrorism has expanded greatly more progress has been made in applying criminological methods than theories to the study of terrorism. To date the most common theoretical perspective from criminology applied to terrorism studies has been rational choice and deterrence.

This chapter takes inventory on how criminology has contributed to terrorism research. It serves to validate current efforts while encouraging continued progress.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to existing financial literature within a less researched area through a systematic, organized, and holistic approach. This study advances the notion of considering terrorist attacks as a heterogeneous group of events by employing a multidimensional approach. The event study methodology was used to investigate the impact of 46 terrorist attacks occurring on the soil of OECD countries since 1990 on stock markets in US, UK, Spain, and Denmark. Thereby, terrorist attacks are considered as events conveying information to financial markets, which is processed by investors and subsequently reflected in security prices. This chapter is the first contribution within financial literature to distinguish and categorize terrorist attacks through several dimensions and investigate the effect of various characteristics on stock markets. The multidimensional analytical approach consisted of six dimensions, which included an examination of the national stock markets, differences across industries, the underlying threat characteristics, the size of the attack, and the development over time and geospatial aspects. It is concluded that terrorist attacks exhibiting international threat characteristics result in significantly larger and boundary spanning negative abnormal returns, which impact stock markets beyond the country in which the attack occurred. Additionally, the size of the terrorist attack amplifies the negative impact on stock markets. However, while the impact on stock markets was found to be immediate indicating that stock markets are quick and efficient in absorbing new information, the negative impact is likely to evaporate within five trading days.

The purpose of this paper is to use an environmental criminology and situational crime prevention (SCP) framework to study global assassinations carried out by terrorists. The authors set forth a series of hypotheses to explain successful and unsuccessful assassination incidents.

The authors use assassination data from the Global Terrorism Database from 1970 to 2014 to estimate a series binary logistic regression models.

Results indicate that various situational factors contribute to successful assassinations, such as target types, weapon types, total fatalities, and injuries.

These findings suggest that environmental criminology and SCP are valuable in developing prevention measures that thwart and disrupt attempted assassinations by terrorists.

Criminology has yet to apply environmental criminology and SCP to assassinations, a tactic often used by terrorists. This paper thus extends the existing assassination, terrorism, and criminology literature by applying this framework to assassinations performed by terrorists.

This chapter explains how economic analysis can contribute to the delineation of the lone wolf’s opportunities and choices in a manner that allows operationally relevant advice to be contributed to the investigative process.

Using a risk-reward analytical framework we examine the lone wolf’s attack method opportunities and choices and identify those attack methods that would be chosen by lone wolves with different levels of risk aversion. We also use prospect theory as an alternative methodology for the determination of the lone wolf’s preference orderings over the available attack methods in a context where he references his actions against those of a predecessor whom he wishes to emulate.

We find that lone wolf terrorists with different levels of risk aversion can be expected to choose different attack methods or combinations of attack methods. More risk averse lone wolf terrorists will choose attack methods such as assassination. Less risk averse lone wolf terrorists will choose attack methods such as bombing, hostage-taking and unconventional attacks. Also, we find that lone wolf terrorists who reference their actions against ‘predecessor’ lone wolf terrorists will choose differently from among the available attack methods depending on which predecessor lone wolf is being referenced.

The analysis provides two different perspectives on terrorist choice but by no means exhausts the analytical alternatives. The analysis focuses on the fatalities and injuries inflicted whereas other perspectives might include different ‘payoffs’ series, including news or media coverage.

The chapter contributes an analysis of the order in which lone wolf terrorists with particular characteristics will choose from a set of available attack methods. During the course of our discussion we point out the consistency between the ‘rise’ of the lone wolf terrorist and the diseconomies to scale that are evident within the terrorism context. This presents the opportunity for new debates.

This research intends to determine the role of terrorism in defying foreign direct investment (FDI) in top terror effected economies.

Panel data on FDI and terrorism from top terror effected economies spanning from 1987 to 2018 were used and the relationship for whole sample was investigated. Later the sample period was divided into pre (1987–2001) and post 9/11 (2002–2018) subsample and same relationship was tested to investigate the normalization of terror effect on FDI. The method of Pooled Mean Group (PMG) was used to test the hypothesis.

The results showed a negative but statistically insignificant impact of terrorism on the FDI inflows in the long run. Later the sample period was divided into pre (1987–2001) and post 9/11 (2002–2018) subsample. The empirical estimates for pre and post 9/11 periods indicated a negative and statistically significant relationship between terrorism and FDI for pre 9/11 period, and a negative but statistically insignificant relationship between the two variables for post 9/11 period.

The findings suggest several important policy implications for the terror affected countries and are further discussed in the study.

Scholars often suggest that violent extremism or terrorism – “the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence to attain a political, economic, religious or social goal through fear, coercion or intimidation” (LaFree, G., & Dugan, L. (2007). Introducing the Global Terrorism Database. Terrorism and Political Violence, 19, 181–204, 184) – is a battle for legitimacy. However, the ambiguous definition of legitimacy often makes its application to counterterrorism measures difficult at best. The purpose of this chapter is to define legitimacy to connect policies designed to counter violent extremism.

The main impediment in the study of the influence of legitimacy on terrorism is the debate over the meaning and measurement of legitimacy. This debate is reviewed, and a recent resolution is presented, grouping the many conceptualizations of legitimacy into three broad categories and identifying empirical indicators for each. These categories are then used to distinguish counterterrorism policies that can be used to boost legitimacy.

This chapter organizes counterterrorism policies into a recently developed framework as a tool for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.

This paper aims to assess the effects of different levels of education, namely, primary, secondary and tertiary, on global terrorism, measured by incidence of global terrorism.

Based on annual panel data covering 120 countries from 1990 to 2017, zero-inflated negative binomial regression (NBR) model is applied to estimate relationship between education and terrorism.

The findings reveal that higher attainment of education at primary and secondary level lowers terrorism worldwide. The findings strongly hold across the most affected regions of the world including Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. Drawing a comparison between the OECD and non-OECD countries, the results are substantially supported throughout.

This study highlights the significance of education, at least up to secondary level, as an effective measure to reduce the extent of terrorist activities worldwide. Apart from this, more focus on education is recommended across the most affected regions (Middle East and North Africa, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa), specifically and the world, generally. Furthermore, as this study focuses at macro level, the future research may focus on factors enforcing individuals to resort to terrorism at individual and group level.

Unlike previous studies, this study contributes to existing literature through investigating the impact of terrorism at different levels of education.

In addition to their effects on economic growth, prolonged terrorist activities can reduce government revenue. Apart from the destruction of physical infrastructure and human capital, terrorism also has lagged-effect on investment, which ultimately dampens the fiscal position and further affects the economic growth. This chapter is devoted to the discussion on the interaction between terrorism, growth, and fiscal variables in Nigeria using real per capita income, government revenue, government expenditure and defense expenditure. The findings show that terrorism is associated with low economic growth which has the potency to reduce government expenditure. It was also observed that government expenditure can be improved by fostering government revenue. In view of this, apart from domestic efforts, interventions of international communities are further needed to reduce the drastic effects of terrorism, especially in meeting and improving expenditure on growth-enhancing sectors.

Terrorism finance (TF) has been aptly termed as the lifeblood of terrorism. TF provides funds for terrorist activities. Terrorists mobilize funds by using the formal banking system, informal value-transfer systems, hawalas, Hundis, and the oldest method of asset transfer. They may raise funds from legitimate sources, such as personal donations and profits from businesses and charitable organizations, as well as from criminal sources, like the drug trade, the smuggling of weapons and other goods, fraud, kidnapping, and extortion. Countering the financing of terrorism is a far greater challenge throughout the world. The objectives of the chapter are as follows: (1) to identify the different sources of terrorism financing, (2) to analyze various ways of moving terrorism funds globally, and (3) to examine the initiatives taken to counter terrorism financing.