ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes several aspects of terrorism based on Global Terrorism Database (GTD), which is currently the world’s most extensive unclassified database on terrorism. As mentioned earlier in the book, all terrorist databases suffer from various issues that affect the reliability of the data and GTD is no exception. The chapter considers only events that are spatially geolocated to make analysis at fine spatial scale. Therefore, events with missing values for longitude or latitude are excluded. The trade-off is that we underestimate the true number of attacks while increasing spatial accuracy of our analysis. The chapter focuses on the lethality of terrorism, or in other words, the propensity of terrorism to kill individuals. In contrast, Europe and the Americas exhibit a higher proportion of non-lethal attacks. While the proportion of lethal attacks versus non-lethal attacks is about equal worldwide, an analysis at finer spatial scale reveals heterogeneity in the lethality of terrorism among continents.
