Third World Terrorism - Perspectives for Quantitative Research (From Behavioral and Quantitative Perspectives on Terrorism, P 242-255, 1981, Yonah Alexander and John M Gleason, eds. - See NCJ-84379)

• NCJ Number: 84384
• Author(s): J M Gleason
• Date Published: 1981
• Length: 14 pages
• Sale Source: Pergamon Press, Inc
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Version of this chapter was presented at the Joint National Meeting of the Operations Research Society of America and the Institute for Management Sciences, Los Angeles, November 13-15, 1978.

Annotation

Possible reasons for the growth of Third World terrorism are noted, and results are presented which suggest that the Poisson is a good model for the occurrence of events of international terrorism in Third World countries, based on data from 1968-74.

Abstract

Possible reasons for the growth of Third World terrorism are suggested by J. Bell (1975): (1) the regular failure of revolutionary campaigns in the Third World which have produced only escalated repression, (2) the repeated collapse of other new strategies, (3) the recognition of the potential for exploitation of the mass media, and (4) political trends within the Third World. The Poisson model appears to be a good model for the occurrences of terrorist events, because the probability that an event of terrorism occurs during a time interval increases with the length of the time interval; the probability is almost negligible that two events of terrorism will occur in a very small time interval; and generally, terrorist events which occur during one time interval are independent of those which occur in any other time interval. The test of the effectiveness of the use of the Poisson model of terrorist occurrences was based on the Jenkins and Johnson/Rand Corporation chronology of 507 incidents of international terrorism that occurred January 9, 1968, to April 26, 1974. Results show that the Poisson model is a good model for terrorist events in the Third World countries. Tabular data show (1) location and month for incidents over the study period, (2) emprical and theoretical information (based on the Poisson model) for incidents in Third World countries, (3) the Poisson probabilities for the number of incidents of terrorism in a given month, and (4) the cumulative distribution for the months in the sample. Twenty-three notes are listed.