A Community-Level Comparison of Terrorism Movements in the United States
Document Type
UAF Access Only - Article
Publication Date
8-17-2016
Abstract
The aim of this article is to identify characteristics of communities where persons indicted under terrorism charges lived, planned, and prepared prior to carrying out a terrorist act. Guided by a model of community deterioration and using data from the Terrorism and Extremist Violence in the United States database, findings indicate: (1) half of all census tracts where terrorists planned and prepared for attacks were located in the western United States; nearly one fourth were in the Northeast; (2) nationally, terrorist pre-incident activity is more likely to occur in census tracts with lower percentages of high school graduates for Al Qaeda and associated movements (AQAM) terrorism but not for far-right terrorism, higher percentages of households living below the poverty level, more urban places, and more unemployed; and (3) communities with terrorist pre-incident activity are different types of places compared to those where there was no pre-incident activity, generally between different regions of the country, and specifically in terms of differences across far-right and AQAM terrorist movements.
Citation
Fitzpatrick, K. M., Gruenewald, J., Smith, B. L., & Roberts, P. (2016). A Community-Level Comparison of Terrorism Movements in the United States. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 40 (5), 399-418. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2016.1212548
