A Comparison Study of International Terrorism Using Geographic Information Systems

This study uses a geographic information system (GIS) to analyze the casualty rates of terrorism attacks carried out from 1990 to 2015 in the three geographic regions of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and North Africa. Each country within these regions was assigned to one of three government regime types (i.e., democracy, anocracy, or autocracy) in order to review what impact a country’s type of government had on casualty rates. The results indicate that the majority of casualties from terrorist attacks occur in non-democratic countries. Moreover, this study confirms that government regime types, independent of other factors, cannot determine how lethal a terrorist attack may be. Lastly, the results show that terrorism-related violence is most concentrated within a few individual countries.