Known Unknowns: The Geography of Anonymous Terrorist Attacks

• In Event: Terrorism

Abstract

In analyses of terrorist incidents, scholars lose over 50 % of the total observations in the dependent variable. Analyses often rely on actors underlying ideological motivations, outcome goals, and characteristics of membership size, sponsorship and other actor specific information. However, such group specific indicators remain unknown in the context of anonymous attacks. But over half of all terrorist incidents recorded, remain unclaimed or are committed by anonymous perpetrators. This represents a dilemma for scientific understanding of the phenomenon and the design of counterterrorism tools that rely on research that omits a significant part of the observable cases. Similarly, previous research on terrorist credit claiming relies on the strategic rationale of group leadership and political reasoning over civilian targeting. To address why known groups decide to “claim or not to claim” does not suffice to understand the phenomenon of anonymous terrorism at large. I take the study of anonymous terrorism further and ask firstly, where and secondly, under which specific conditions are unclaimed terrorist incidents increasingly likely to occur. Applying GIS and negative binomial regression on a set of 40.000 unclaimed terrorist attacks between 1997 and 2014, I highlight location and distribution of such events and provide causal explanations. First, the results show the need for scholars to acknowledge the inherent emittance of anonymous terrorist incidents from their analyses and to derive strategies to incorporate these. Further, the study provides insights into the most vulnerable context to direct counterterrorism strategies. With anonymous attacks representing the majority of contemporary incidents, the study of unclaimed attacks is vital to further counterterrorism efforts and deepen understanding of terrorism as phenomenon at large. Counterterrorism based on the rationale of identified actors will continue to turn a blind eye to one of the greatest sources of incidents today.

Author

• Wendy Wagner, University of California San Diego