What Fueled Terrorism in Europe? A Look at the Data
Ukraine, Russia, France, Norway & More: Data from 2000-2020 shows that geopolitical conflict and ideological extremism were major forces fueling terrorism.
What comes to your mind when you think of terrorism? Americans will likely remember 9/11 and the wars that followed, or the Boston Marathon attacks. If you were born in the early 2000s in Europe, like I was, you probably have the same images in your head: The ISIS terrorism in France or the mass murder of Neo-Nazi Anders Breivik in Norway.
You’ll probably also remember the media frenzy that followed these events: hours of media coverage, hundreds of articles, and countless interviews. Attacks quickly became political, with the far-right seeking to take advantage with anti-muslim rhetoric. In a world so polarized by tragedies, it makes sense to take a step back and look at the actual data.
The Global Terrorism Database (GTD)1 kept record of every - yes, every - single known terrorist attack from 1970-2020. The immense dataset of over 200,000 attacks tells many stories. For this article, I want to focus on the data on terrorist attacks in Europe over the last two decades, from 2000 to 2020. When creating the visualization you see below, I was a bit stunned myself, because the large majority of terrorist attacks took place in areas I did not guess from my subjective experience over the years. Once one thinks about the most affected regions in the map, the data quickly makes sense.
A quick disclaimer: This map only depicts attacks were at least one person was killed. 80% of terrorist attacks in Europe/Russia (2000-2020) actually had no deaths.
The two most affected areas in this map are almost impossible to miss. First, there’s the Donbas region, which became the center of geopolitical conflict in Europe as the war against Russian-backed Separatists started in 2014 (You can hover over the map to reveal details for each attack). The second region is the Chechen Republic, which remains a part of Russia after a series of wars. It is also in that region, where the deadliest terrorist attack on our map took place: In 2004, in Beslan, Chechen separatists took an entire school hostage, resulting in the death of 344 people. In both these regions, geopolitical conflict spurred unparalleled periods of terrorism. Another region in the eastern half of Europe where geopolitical conflict fed terrorism is Kosovo. Taken together, about 85% of attacks in Europe happened in Eastern Europe (which includes Russia, according to the Global Terrorism Database).
While Western Europe represents a much smaller slice of total attacks, it is worth looking at the patterns there, because they have been different, and yet also similar to Eastern Europe. According to the data, Terrorism in Western Europe had two causes over the past two decades: Geopolitical conflict and ideological radicalism.
The terrorist attacks resulting from geopolitical conflict in Western Europe are less visible on the map, as they often resulted in fewer casualties. The two primary regions where geopolitical terrorism thrived are northern Spain (the Basques) and the UK (Northern Ireland). In both cases, separatists carried out numerous, but often targeted, attacks. While attacks in the Basques primarily happened in the early 2000s, attacks in Northern Ireland were more spread out across the two decades. The conflict in Northern Ireland, and the attacks there, reached their peak before the turn of the century and are therefore not included in our dataset.
The largest spikes in the western half of our map are the results of ideological extremism. The blue spikes (also quite present in Russia) represent Islamic terrorism, which mostly occurred as ISIS reached the peak of its power between 2014 and 2016. These include the infamous attacks in Paris (2015) and Nice (2016). As ISIS was diminished in the Middle East, the number of attacks declined sharply. Separately, there was another spike of Islamic terrorism in Spain in 2004, which was triggered by Al-Qaida.
While far-right parties tend to blame mass migration for this kind of ideological extremism in Europe, geopolitical reasons make more sense when trying to explain the attacks. France was hit the hardest by ISIS and other jihadist-inspired attacks, yet its refugee intake in 2015 and 2016 was similar to that of other countries in Europe that weren’t hit nearly as hard, or not at all. France was one of the most active Western military forces in the Middle East, making the country a target for ISIS. Additionally, ISIS and other Islamic terrorist groups had the goal of provoking backlash against muslims in their target countries, so they could better spread their extremism.
Germany, the country that had the largest intake of refugees in all of Western Europe in the 2010s, has seen a comparatively small number of attacks. The country also serves as a good case to show the mix of Islamic terrorism with the other major ideological kind of terrorism we saw, and still see, in Western Europe: Far-right terrorism.
Far-right terrorism has been a consistent factor throughout the two decades. Although the number of attacks remains at a lower level than other forms of terrorism, the victim count leads to large red-colored spikes on our map. Norway, which has seen almost no terrorist attacks from 2000 to 2020, suffered a string of horrific acts of terrorism by neo-nazi Anders Breivik, who bombed government quarters in Oslo, killing eight, and proceeded to kill 69 children and teenagers attending a social-democratic youth camp on the island of Utøya. In Germany, far-right attacks in Hanau and Munich, as well as the targeted assassination of Walter Luebke, upset the nation. In all these cases, in Norway and in Germany, the attackers either directly attacked migrants or were motivated by a hatred of migrants and/or minority groups.
Unfortunately, the data ends in 2020. We can only hope that we get more well-structured data in the coming years. If you enjoyed this story, feel free to subscribe to receive new posts in your email inbox. It’s completely free!
All Data was provided by the Global Terrorism Database
START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism). (2022). Global Terrorism Database, 1970 - 2020 [data file]. https://www.start.umd.edu/data-tools/GTD