Terrorism is defined as acts of violence by non-state actors, perpetrated against civilian populations, intended to cause fear. For the past fifty years, terrorism has impacted the lives of a large part of the world population. Those terrorists attacks have different goals (religious, political, ideological,...) but they always impact the life of the citizen of the countries/cities that they target. We want to study and try to understand what are the factors behind the formation of terrorist groups. Terrorism is closely related to the political context of a given country and/or region. With our work, we want to raise awareness on what makes a terrorist group emerge and profer. In the last part of our analysis, we created a model to try to predict a possible upcoming attack based on past information. For that, we are looking for terrorist attacks data and political data in the world across the last decades.
Through this work, we hope to :
- Determine which are the main terrorist groups of the past four decades.
- What methods are used by these terrorist groups?
- What is the impact of terrorism on the targeted countries?
- On the tourism
- On the happiness and fragility index
- What are the ideologies and motives of the terrorist groups across time?
- Is there different ages of terrorism?
- In which political context are the attacks performed?
- Can we guess the political context with only information about terrorism (wordcloud)
- Can we use past data to predict an upcoming attack?
- Introduction
- Motivations
- Datasets
- Infography
- Overall analysis
- Effect on tourism
- Happiness index and Fragility state index in world map
- Terrorist group
- Graph of groups
- Evolutions of groups
- Focus on Global North Countries
- Learning From the Past
- Graph that links the terrorist groups and the targeted countries
- Predictive model
- Mini Quiz : Word Cloud
- Importance of context
In this project, we used data from many sources. The main part of our analysis is done with the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) which is a database of incidents of terrorism from 1970 onward. As of July 2017, the list extended through 2016, with an incomplete data of 1993 due to issues with that year. The database is maintained by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, College Park in the United States.
We also had a look on terrorists groups using the Extended Data on Terrorist Groups (EDTG), an extended data set of 760 terrorist groups that engaged in attacks during 1970 to 2016. EDTG is linked to terrorist groups and attacks given in the Global Terrorism Database. Terrorist groups’ variables in EDTG include ideology, main goals, start date, duration, base country, attack diversity, peak size, alternative endings (if relevant), and others.
Datas about Happiness come from the World Happiness Report, a landmark survey of the state of global happiness that ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be.
Finaly we used the Fragile States Index (FSI) produced by The Fund for Peace (FFP), which is a critical tool in highlighting not only the normal pressures that all states experience, but also in identifying when those pressures are outweighing a states’ capacity to manage those pressures.
You can access the webpage of our final data story and lies through this link. We hope you'll enjoy reading it!
We all worked on most tasks, except those specifically noted below. We worked separately, then we had weekly team meetings.
The tasks that were handled individually were handled as follows:
Alex: Handled the web app visual aspects.
Antoni: Built the network graphs.
Charles: Took care of the political context part.
Hugo: Analysed the evolution of terrorism through time.