Analysis of the impact of political isolation of ethnic groups on the growth of terrorism

Abstract

The presented work examines terrorist violence at the subnational level, taking into account the fact that the regions of residence of politically excluded ethnic groups are exposed to a higher terrorist risk. Moreover, this risk may be exacerbated by the high population density of the region, the level of economic development and the type of political regime of the country. There is some reason to believe that the influence of political isolation may also be more likely to motivate cases of ethnic violence when this exclusion is combined with numerous local and country conditions that increase awareness of group competition and unequal distribution of socio-economic resources. The study uses geocoded incidents of terrorist attacks within States in combination with a set of data on ethnic groups' access to political power in the country and an additional set of control variables. The analysis focuses on the assessment of domestic terrorism incidents for 185 countries in 1970-2019. Logistic regression with random effects was used to verify the assumptions made. In general, it was found that ethnic political isolation is an important risk factor for local terrorist violence. It was also revealed that more densely populated and affluent regions are at much greater risk of violence if at least one excluded ethnic group is present in them. These trends are much more pronounced in democratic countries, in which cases of political isolation are deviations rather than the norm.