The war on terrorism will have lasted seven years by September 2008, making it much longer than the American Civil War or World War II. Current American national security and military strategy documents, in fact, frame this war as a protracted struggle, one which may see persistent conflict lasting several decades. Despite the duration of this war, the US government has not yet exhibited a grea...

Global climate change (GCC), like the global terrorism that chased it from world attention in recent months, eminently threatens life and lifestyles worldwide in highly complex and uncertain ways. Also similarly, any benefits derived from successful actions to address either problem will exhibit considerable public-goods properties: all will benefit to considerable degree and excluding some fro...

In the 21st Century, distinctions and boundaries between global health, international politics, and the broader interests of the global community are harder to define and enforce than ever before. As a result, global health workers, leaders, and institutions face pressing questions around the nature and extent of their involvement with non-health endeavors, including international conflict reso...

In the spirit of Richardson’s original (1948) study of the statistics of deadly conflicts, we study the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks worldwide over the past 38 years, and show that these events are uniformly characterized by the phenomenon of scale invariance, i.e., the frequency scales as an inverse power of the severity, P (x) ∝ x−α. We show that this property is a robust featu...

This paper analyses the link between the VDAX as a proxy for European fi nancial uncertainty and the number of terror incidents in Western Europe. Considering data of the Global Terrorism Database, the number of terror incidents does – on average – not aff ect fi nancial uncertainty. In contrast, based on a behavioral model of terrorism motivated by Schmid and de Graaf (1982), lagged fi nancial...

Much research in the last several decades has examined the social, political, and economic factors that predict terrorism, yet to date, there has been little attention to cultural factors and their relationship to terrorism. We present findings from the Global Terrorism Database showing how numerous cultural dimensions identified in the cultural psychology literature relate to over 80,000 terro...

Using data that combines information from the Federal Aviation Administration, the RAND Corporation and a newly developed database on global terrorist activity, we are able to examine trends in 1,101 attempted aerial hijackings that occurred around the world from 1931 to 2003. We have especially complete information for 828 for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), grant nu...

Title of Dissertation: STATE INSTABILITY AND TERRORISM Susan Fahey, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor Gary LaFree Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice I explore the relationship between political instability and terrorism in this dissertation, using the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), which contains both domestic and transnational terrorism. I use the Pol...

Global terrorism presents collective action issues for targeted nations. Proactive measures (e.g., preemptive strikes) against terrorists create external benefits for all at-risk nations. In contrast, defensive actions deflect attacks to softer targets, thereby giving rise to external benefits to protected foreign residents and external costs to venues abroad. Coordinated antiterrorism measures...

To the Editor—As a reader of Clinical Infectious Diseases living and working in Vietnam, I was naturally drawn to the article by Murray et al. [1] about infections during the Vietnam-America conflict. I was, however, disappointed to see the expression “the global war on terrorism” appear twice in the article. “The global war on terrorism” is a doctrinal slogan that may be popular in the United ...