Knowledge Extraction on the Nexus Between Terrorism Criteria and Attacks on Private Citizens and Property

Introduction

Knowledge extraction is an aspect of data mining that seeks to discover hidden knowledge from both structured and unstructured data sources. This study deploys data mining techniques to extract knowledge on the association between the terrorism inclusion criteria and one of the terrorism target/victim types known as “private citizens and property”. The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) maintained by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) defines a terrorist attack as the illegal use of force and violence by an actor (usually non-state actor) to coerce, intimidate, and instill fear in order to achieve goals that are political, social, economic, or religious in nature (START, 2017). Miller (2017) identified six categories of terrorism on the basis of ideological motivations. The categories include left-wing extremism, environmental extremism, right-wing extremism, religious extremism, nationalist/separatist extremism, and single-issue extremism. The left-wing terrorists perpetrate violence with the aim of ensuring that the ‘highly-placed’ in the society do not lord it over the ‘lowly-placed’. The actors of environmental extremism carry out violence in support of the belief that the environment, including plants and animals, need to be protected from destruction resulting from human activities. The right-wing extremism entails violence aimed at promoting nationalist, fascist, or ethnic supremacy. Religious extremism is a form of terrorism by which violence is perpetrated to project faith-based ideologies, views and practices. The nationalist/separatist terrorists carry out violent attacks in order to enforce and or preserve ethnic or geo-political identity and self-determination. On the other hand, the single-issue terrorists engage in violence with the aim of projecting a specific, often minute, cause which may have a political undertone. Hamelin et al. (2010) examined the factors that trigger individuals to engage in terrorism using Morocco as a case study. According to Hamelin et al. (2010), individuals transit along three states in order to become established terrorists. The initial state is known as the “doing nothing state”; and the factors that trigger an individual to transit to the second state, the “protesting peacefully state”, are newspaper news, worldwide events, perceived poverty, income, and level of education of an individual. From the “protesting peacefully state”, individuals transit to the “armed resistance state” as established terrorists. The factors that trigger the shift from the second state to the last state are friends’ influence, low trust in government, level of education and household size (Hamelin et al., 2010).

Some studies have leveraged on the geographic area of attacks and operations to categorize terror groups (Nance, 2008; Oyelere et al., 2018). These categories include local terrorists who operate within a district, town or city; regional terrorists whose operations encompass a number of cities, states or regions within the same country. Other categories include national terrorists who operate in most or all states of a country; transnational terrorists who operate across multiple national boundaries and international terror groups who operate in many countries and continents (Nance, 2008; Oyelere et al., 2018).