Terrorism kills far fewer people than other forms of violence. Armed conflict kills nine times as many people as terrorism, and homicide kills over 45 times as many people.
Terrorism is a unique threat not because it kills the most people, but because it has the greatest potential psychological and social impact. For example, after the October 7th attacks in Israel, support for the peace process and two-state solution collapsed, and rates of worry,
sadness, and stress all more than doubled.
The impact of large scale terrorist attacks is compounded when they are unexpected. The attack in Israel was a considerable statistical outlier, with no previous attack in the country claiming more than 50 lives.
Deaths from terrorism are not evenly distributed across attacks. Eighty per cent of deaths from terrorism occurred from the top 18 per cent of attacks.
Deaths from terrorism at the group level are even more unevenly distributed. Just 11 terrorist groups were responsible for 80 per cent of all deaths from terrorism since 2007.
Most terrorist groups do not last very long. Of the 139 groups that were active in 2007, just 25 were still active in 2023. Over 44 per cent of groups last two years or less.
Terrorist groups that disband are not being replaced with new groups at the same rate. The total number of active terrorist groups has fallen 51 per cent since 2007. This fall was almost identical for political, religious, and nationalist terrorist groups.
Terrorism is correlated with measures of both negative peace, such as the Global Peace Index, and Positive Peace. All three GPI domains and seven of the eight PPI pillars correlate with the Global Terrorism Index.
The drivers of terrorism vary in strength between highly economically developed and developing countries. In the OECD, internal conflict is only weakly linked to terrorism, whilst outside of the OECD it is the strongest predictor.
For Positive Peace, Acceptance of the Rights of Others had the strongest correlation for both OECD and non-OECD countries.
