Modelling & Analysis of High Impact Terrorist Attacks in India & Its Neighbors

Abstract

Terrorism perpetrated in any country by either internal or external actors jeopardizes the country’s security, economic growth, societal peace, and harmony. Hence, accurate modelling of terrorism has become a necessary component of the national security mission of most nations. This research extracted and analyzed high impact attacks (HIAs) perpetrated by terrorists in India and its neighboring countries since 1970 using the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). We evaluated the extraction efficacy of the Global Terrorism Index Impact Score (GTI-IS) against the GTD measure “nkill” using the iterative outlier analysis (IOA) heuristic. The heuristic identified 6117 common HIAs using nkill or GTI-IS attributes. GTI-IS extracted 1718 exclusive HIAs that nkill missed, while nkill extracted 2233 exclusive HIAs. We further classified the extracted HIAs into lethal and non-lethal attacks. Next, we conducted a rigorous spatiotemporal exploratory analysis of countries that reported the most HIAs. Though Afghanistan, India, and Sri Lanka exhibited global spatial autocorrelation, Pakistan did not. Ripley’s G function suggested the recurrence of lethal attacks near other similar events. This analysis showed that lethal and non-lethal attacks in those countries follow different statistical distributions, which can aid in focused counterterrorism tactics.