ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the location of terrorism in space and provides further clarification on the statistical concept of spatial randomness. It discusses how terrorism can be viewed as a spatial phenomenon within a statistical framework and introduce statistical tools to analyze its properties. The chapter shows that contrary to popular belief, terrorist events often occur close to each other, and hence, form clusters at various spatial scales. It also shows how the theoretical lenses by which spatial data is assumed to be generated may affect the results of the analysis of spatial patterns. The chapter illustrates the important role of the geographic scale upon which the detection of clusters depends. Since terrorist attacks are not the results of pure chance, spatial patterns of terrorism can be detected at various scales using relevant statistical techniques. Hence, one can highlight areas that are more affected by terrorism than others within countries or within lower-level administrative regions.
