MEASURING AND UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACT OF TERRORISM

statistics. As they were no longer counting
casualties in the same way, simple
comparisons between the pre- and post-9/11
world became impossible with US
government data. (Cynics suggested that
this was the purpose of the change.) So if we
look at the GTD as a surrogate dataset, we
find that terrorists in 2014 can kill over a
thousand each month — whereas from 1995
to 2003 only 2001 showed more than a
thousand killed. Nor is the GTD the only
study that shows a very large increase:
similar conclusion emerges from a BBC
Monitoring/ICSR study of Islamist violence in
November 2014 which showed that around
5,000 were killed.
How can this be? How can Stephen Pinker,
using robust data, produce one conclusion,
while statistics drawn from the same database
indicate the opposite? The obvious answer is
that they are actually talking about different
things. Pinker excludes attacks on Coalition
forces in Afghanistan after 2001 and Iraq after
2003. The State Department in the 1990s
defined terrorism pretty narrowly as politically
motivated violence outside a state of war. The
BBC/ICSR study narrows the scope in one
dimension (Islamist violence only) but is
extremely wide in another dimension (the
form the violence takes and the context in
which it occurs.) Given the nature of early
twenty-first-century conflicts which, for
various historical and geopolitical reasons are
predominantly taking place in Muslim-majority
countries, a lot of violence can readily be
labelled as ‘Islamist’. The GTD is wider still
than the BBC/ICSR study as it includes
violence not involving Islamists, but includes
violence taking place in many of the same
conflicts in South Asia, the Middle East, and
East, North and West Africa that feature so
heavily in that other study. When the State
Department was counting, therefore, it
excluded civil wars, insurgencies, and even
some kinds of guerrilla movements from its
attention. Now, those tend to be included.
That is not to say that the GTI is wrong to
include these types of violence. In fact, it
would be perverse to exclude the ‘Islamic
State’ (ISIL/Daesh) or al-Shabaab from a report
on the frequency and severity of terrorist
violence. Both of those entities would
unquestionably meet most people’s definitions
of terrorist organisations. (For instance, they
are both proscribed in the UK under terrorism
legislation.) But the point is that some forms of
their violence are qualitatively different from
terrorism as it was understood in the 1990s. In
particular, both groups see acquiring and
holding territory as a primary objective, and
this shapes what they do with their violent
capabilities. Indeed, ISIL functions in many
ways as a state with an army rather than as a
terrorist group which happens to control
some land. Without wishing to confer any kind
of political or legal legitimacy to its
aspirations, it would be absurd to categorise
an organisation that is well equipped with
heavy weapons, that controls territory in
which perhaps 8 million or more are living,
and which raises and spends millions of
dollars in a month as being considered in
same category as left-wing Greek terrorists or
animal rights extremists (both of who are
considered terrorist organizations in some
jurisdictions).
The point is a lack of clarity about what
constitutes a ‘terrorist.’ This is not only the
well-worn cliché of one man’s freedom fighter
being another man’s terrorist, but more
fundamentally, the point that the group of
actors that is increasingly grouped together as
‘terrorist’ is one that is becoming so broad as
to lose all useful coherence.
This is important for researchers but for
practitioners, policy-makers, and the public
too. When politicians say — as many do — that
the terrorist threat has never been higher, we
are entitled to know whether there is evidence
that supports their claims. Statistics can be
manipulated but even in most areas of
controversial policy there is someone, perhaps
in a university, who is able to say definitively
what the data shows. More urgently,
practitioners and policy-makers need to know
what works in both countering terrorism and
its more recent near-synonym, ‘violent
extremism’. If terrorism is getting worse, what
does this tell us about the billions of dollars,
pounds and euros that have been expended
on dealing with it since 9/11? Our difficulty
with defining not just terrorism but forms of
violence more generally is a significant part of
the problem here. It seems clear, for example,
that transnational terrorism targeting the West
is rare (even if, on occasions, it can account
for horrendous levels of casualties) and that
while it has not gone away it has not got
statistically worse. The threat from domestic
terrorist movements in Europe has declined
dramatically from its highpoint in the 1970s,
when extreme left-wing groups terrorised the
Continent and Irish republican and loyalist
groups carried out almost daily attacks. And it
is clear that, while wars are less destructive
now than they were in the twentieth century,
there are still some very nasty ones indeed
— and that some of the worst involve
Islamist terrorist groups such as ISIL and
al-Shabaab.
What might seem an arid discussion of
statistics and terminology points, therefore,
to a significant change in what we
understand by terrorism, and perhaps to a
change in the problem itself. Groups still try
to put bombs on planes and assassinate
their enemies but the transition to extremist
state-building, signalled as early as the
1990s by the Algerian GIA but carried out
most extensively by al-Shabaab and ISIL
(with groups in South East Asia, Yemen and
North Africa also attempting it), is an
historically significant development. The
wars that accompany state-building by
groups espousing Islamist ideologies are
linked to but qualitatively different from the
Islamist terrorism that is exemplified by
al-Qa’ida’s major transnational attacks. But
conflating these varying groups under the
same banner causes further analytical
issues.
This problem of conflation or aggregation
has been well recognised by academics
such as Peter Neumann who has described
the tendency “to lump together groups and
individuals in vastly different situations of
violent conflict just because they use similar
tactics” as “the cardinal sin of ‘terrorism
studies’” 3 . The dominance of Islamist
violence in our concerns about terrorism
may be leading to a different kind of
conflation — of lumping together groups
using different tactics just because they
express themselves using a similar ideology.
This problem matters beyond academic
debate because it may be one explanation
for the lack of consensus in so many
questions we need to answer about political
violence in today’s world, including the most
fundamental questions of causality. Does, for
example, poverty lead to terrorism? Absolute
or relative deprivation was once widely
assumed to be a major factor, until post-9/11
econometric studies appeared to show that
it wasn’t. Economists who turned to the
study of terrorism demonstrated from robust
data that transnational terrorism seemed to
be perpetrated by people in countries with
low levels of civil liberties against people
living in rich countries — but wealth and
inequality in the source countries appear to
be irrelevant. These findings are important
but they do not tell the whole story. If we
look at a movement like Boko Haram, for
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