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A Community Level Comparison of Terrorism Movements in the United States

Abstract:

The aim of this paper 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 (TEVUS) database, findings indicate: 1) half of all census tracts where terrorists planned and prepared for attacks were located in the western U.S.; 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 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) bivariate and multivariate analyses suggest that 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.

Publication Information

Full Citation:

Fitzpatrick, Kevin, Jeff Guenewald, Brent Smith, and Paxton Roberts. (2016). "A Community Level Comparison of Terrorism Movements in the United States." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (July): 1-46. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2016.1212548

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