Hi, my name is Gary LaFree. I'm the director of the START Center. And in these two, next two lectures, I want to talk about what I call nine myths about terrorism. What I'm talking about here is myth in the everyday sense of something that's not shown to be true by empirical or scientific evidence. And in this two lectures, what I really want to do is talk about how we get images of what terrorism is, largely from the media. And the fact that terrorist cases often attract a huge amount of attention, sometimes even international attention, but then when you actually look at terrorism cases carefully and you look a large number of them, your images may be quite different, that the stereotypes may not hold up. Now to look at a large number of cases, we're going to rely on a database that is supported here by the START Center, called the Global Terrorism Database, or the GTD. It contains now, up through 2012, going back to 1970, it now contains over 113,000 terrorist attacks from everywhere around the world. In fact, the goal of the GTD is to collect every single terrorist attack that happens anywhere on the planet overtime, which we've been struggling very hard to do. Now, why do we use these stereotypes? Why do stereotypes have such an important impact? SAS, Nassim Taleb, defines an event as a Black Swan incident, if it falls outside the realm of regular expectations, has a high impact, and defies expectations. The term is based on the observation that before they visited Australia, Europeans had assumed that all swans were white. An assumption that actually fit their actual experience, until visitors arrived in Australia and were able to witness black swans. Taleb claims that the coordinated attacks of 9/11 are a perfect example of a Black Swan Event because they were unexpected, they had a huge impact on history, and they were very difficult to predict in advance. So, when we talk about how stereotypes could affect our images of terrorism and maybe give us incorrect assumptions about terrorism, this Black Swan idea sort of fits in, that black swans can have a huge impact, even though they're not typical at all of the underlying reality. So what I want to do in the next two lectures is talk a little bit about some of the ideas we get, stereotypes we get, really, because of the black swan nature of terrorist attacks. And then compare those stereotypes to what we find if we look in much greater detail at how those attacks, how many attacks around the world have happened, going all the way back to 1970. And by the way, this phenomenon, I think, is not just true for terrorism. It's true for lots of criminal actions. If you think about it, like a very well publicized homicide may result in all kinds of changes to a law, even though this homicide is not at all typical of all homicides that occur. And now, in order to break this lecture up, I'm going to talk about five myths this time, and then during a follow up lecture, I'll talk about four other myths. If we talk about the first of these myths, I would say it's this, that terrorist attacks were rapidly increasing in the years leading up to 9/11. If you think about all the publicity generated by an attack like 9/11, it's easy to think that it was representing a kind of big upsurge, a big upswing in terrorist attacks. And it was maybe the most pronounced of these attacks. And by the way, I'm going to be talking about 9/11 as an example, but lots of other countries have their 9/11's, as well. So for example, the London attacks some years ago on the metro system and on the tube, the attacks on the train system in Madrid, the Mumbai coordinated attacks, the recent attack in Oslo, all of these attacks, which have generated a huge amount of publicly, can have a kind of Black Swam effect. In other words, they contribute to our stereotypes about terrorism, even though when you look at more ordinary run of the mill cases, they may not quite live up to these stereotypes. Okay, so, what about this idea that terrorist attacks were rapidly increasing in the years before 9/11. If we look at the first slide, we see that, in fact, the reality is quite different than this. According to our data, terrorist attacks actually reached their 20th century high point not in the years leading up to 9/11, but actually in a much more recent period, and in fact, there was a major increase in terrorist attacks in 1992, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Total attacks the year before 9/11 were actually at about the same level as they had been in the mid-1970s. In fact, in the four years prior to 9/11, worldwide terrorist attacks were at their lowest level in about 20 years. Since 9/11, you can also see that attacks have again been increasing dramatically, so that the end of the series is setting new records, and this is, I think, going to be the case, as we move forward as well. Okay, myth number two. Terrorist attacks reach every corner of the world. The fact that we live in such an interconnected world, where we get a media presence, even in relatively isolated and faraway places, gives us the impression that terrorism is happening everywhere and that it could happen anywhere. However, when we really look at the data, if we look at the GTD data, for example, we can see that, in fact, terrorist attacks tend to be highly concentrated. And this is true for lots of different types of crime, as well. This blanket media coverage then gives us the incorrect idea that no place on the planet is really safe. But in fact, our analysis of the GTD indicates that terrorist attacks happen in relatively few places. For example, the top ten countries, in terms of terrorist attacks, account for nearly half of all terrorist activity in the world since 1970. So, what does this mean? Well, it means about 5% of all countries in the world account for more than 50% of all terrorists attacks. If we look at 10% of the countries of the world, it accounts for 75% of the world's terrorist attacks. So, terrorism tends to be, in fact, highly concentrated. And there are many parts of the world where you are very unlikely to experience a terrorist attack. Myth number three. The U.S. is more frequently targeted by terrorists than any other country in the world. And this one applies especially to 9/11 because it did receive so much publicity. And not just in the United States, but in many parts of the world. I think all of us would wish that we had received a dollar for every time we've seen the horrifying image of fully loaded jet airplanes crashing into the Twin Towers. It's become such a ubiquitous image that it's hard to get it out of your mind. But when we use the GTT to actually examine the frequency of attacks, and the number of fatalities by country, we find that the U.S. ranks about 14th in the world, in terms of total attacks, and about 16th, in terms of total fatalities. The most frequently attacked country in our data set is Colombia, and the country with the most terrorist fatalities is Iraq. And in fact, while the U.S. ranked 16th, in terms of total fatalities, a big chunk of this is due to a simple, one event, the 9/11 attacks, responsible for something like 90% of total U.S. terrorism over the period we covered. If you take these attacks from out of the estimates, U.S. fatalities from terrorism are similar to fatalities for, say, Canada or Greece. Myth number four. Most terrorists attacks involve disgruntled groups and individuals from one country attacking civilians in another country. We think again about the 9/11 attacks, or for that matter, some of the other high profile recent attacks, like those in Mumbai and Madrid and London. They often involve a situation where individuals from one country come to do serious damage to another country. So, they are what we might call international attacks. But, how common are these international attacks? Well, actually, as researchers, it's been very difficult to figure this out until quite recently because none of the major databases that have studied terrorism, until pretty recently, distinguished between domestic and international attacks. In fact, the GTD is one of the first databases that actually includes both international and domestic attacks going back a long period of time. In an analysis that my colleagues and I did, looking at terrorist attacks in the GTD, we found that a very large proportion of attacks in the GTD involve, in fact, domestic assailants, domestic groups, attacking domestic targets. In the study we did, we concentrated on 52 foreign terrorist groups that were identified by the U.S. State Department as posing an especially great threats to the U.S. Security System. Based on the GTD data, we found that more than 90% of the 17,000 attacks that were attributed to these groups were actually domestic attacks. So that means nine times out of ten, these groups operated at home against local targets. This means that, for example, a group originating in, say Pakistan, was attacking a Pakistani organization or an individual in Pakistan, so an entirely domestic event, and this wasn't a random sample of cases in the GTD. It was a group of terrorist organizations that had a special interest or motive perhaps for attacking the United States and even among this group, it was fairly rare for them to actually do this. Most of the attacks were actually domestic, happening in their own country against citizens from their own country. Myth number five. Terrorism is unrelated to traditional political grievances. If you take an attack like 9/11, which seem to be so irrational, which seem to have the characteristics of nothing that could of been done to negotiate or to prevent it, where the goals of the perpetrators were not even entirely clear, it's easy to think that all attacks have political grievances that are hard to sort out. In the next slide, however, we show the top ten terrorist organizations in the GTD from 1970 to 2012. And what's really striking about this top 12, or top 10 chart, is how many of these organizations actually have a pretty specific political agenda. Mostly, this agenda involves having access to some land for some particular group. It could be an organization such as ETA, that wants its own homeland in a particular part of Spain and France, or it could be an organization like the FMLN, that's trying to take over an entire country for a particular group. But nonetheless, they tend to have fairly specific political agendas, often based on the idea of trying to develop a homeland for a particular group. So, in fact, these do not seem to be unrelated to political grievances, but in fact, are very political. So, I'm going to conclude here, and I'm going to talk about the four other myths in the next lecture. Thank you very much.
