Suicide Bombings and Situational Clustering: Are Bombing Tactics that Different?

• In Event: Understanding and Responding to Suicide Terrorism

Abstract

Suicide terrorism has arguably been the most frequently studied tactic in terrorism research. However, only eight studies have compared suicide attacks (or attackers) with non-suicide attacks (or attackers). Furthermore, there have been no empirical studies that have made explicit comparisons between suicide bombings and other related tactics, such as vehicle bombings or planted bomb attacks. Following previous attempts to better understand the situational clustering of crime and aerial hijackings, this study looks to identify how suicide bombings cluster and the strength of this clustering at the attack- and country-level using multinomial hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). Using data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) to identify suicide bombings, vehicle bombings, and planted bomb attacks, this study compares these tactics on a number of relevant factors identified from the literature. Overall, the analysis will include over 70,000 incidents that involved some type of explosive device, including over 3,750 suicide bombings and over 6,250 vehicle bombings, from 1970-2014. The results will be discussed in relation to situational and rational choice perspectives of terrorism.

Author

• Michael Distler, University of Maryland