Impact of Selected Historical Events on the Income-Based Distribution of Terrorism. From the Rise of Fundamentalist Terrorism to the Iraq War

The study applies time series analysis to establish whether income-based transference of international terrorism took place in reaction to the rise of the fundamentalist-based terrorism, the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and the 2003 Iraq invasion. It introduces several extensions to an article by Enders and Sandler (2006), for instance it uses two independent datasets and presents an alternative approach to the events in Iraq. The differences in results between this paper and Enders and Sandler (2006) are caused by the lack of consistency in employing the World Bank’s income classification by the two authors. This study finds that the rise of fundamentalist terrorism brought increases across all countries, while the post-Cold War era resulted in a reduction in attacks only in high and medium income countries. 9/11 appeared to have had no long lasting impact on distribution of terrorism, while the Iraq invasion seemed to have reduced international terrorism in rich states.