Cross-Border Impacts of Terrorist Attacks and the Importance of Proximity

Abstract

Most research on the impact of terrorist attacks either investigates their effects within the country where the events occurred or analyses the cross-border consequences in different countries of a single attack on foreign soil. In contrast, there is a lack of studies that directly compare the impacts of multiple terrorist attacks on foreign soil in a single country. Consequently, country characteristics are much better explored as explanatory factors of cross-border effects of terrorism than are characteristics of the attacks themselves. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of six foreign terrorist attacks on the public debate on domestic affairs in the US. We specifically seek to explain the cross-border impacts of these attacks through the use of two event characteristics: place and distance. As such, we selected attacks that are highly comparable, except for their locus of occurrence. Based on quantitative and thematic content analyses of four American newspapers, our results indicate that the six attacks had varying domestic impacts, that the concepts of ‘place’ and ‘distance’ help explain these differences, and that various forms of distance (not only geographical proximity, but also cultural, historical, and emotional distance) are relevant for doing so.