Preventing successful assassination attacks by terrorists: an environmental criminology approach

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to use an environmental criminology and situational crime prevention (SCP) framework to study global assassinations carried out by terrorists. The authors set forth a series of hypotheses to explain successful and unsuccessful assassination incidents. Design/methodology/approach The authors use assassination data from the Global Terrorism Database from 1970 to 2014 to estimate a series binary logistic regression models. Findings Results indicate that various situational factors contribute to successful assassinations, such as target types, weapon types, total fatalities, and injuries. Practical implications These findings suggest that environmental criminology and SCP are valuable in developing prevention measures that thwart and disrupt attempted assassinations by terrorists. Originality/value Criminology has yet to apply environmental criminology and SCP to assassinations, a tactic often used by terrorists. This paper thus extends the existing assassination, terrorism, and criminology literature by applying this framework to assassinations performed by terrorists.

Disrupting Terrorist Assassinations Through Situational Crime Prevention

“…In support of Mandala and Freilich’s (2017) findings, when more fatalities occur during an assassination, the attack is more likely to be successful. This aligns with the literature, and is also logical considering that for an assassination to be considered successful, at least one individual (i.e., the target) must be killed.…”

“…A strength of this study is its use of open sources to create new independent variables to test an additional nine hypotheses. This article, therefore, extends Mandala and Freilich’s (2017) study applying SCP to assassinations that was limited to only GTD variables. After randomly selecting our sample, we used open source materials to code for the new SCP variables.…”

Situational Crime Prevention and Terrorism: An Assessment of 10 Years of Research

“…Importantly, the 2015 peak in SCP and terrorism studies ( n = 9) is less related to the publication of special issues and instead is constituted by an array of relevant scholarly studies published in both terrorism and criminal justice journals. In the period subsequent to our study’s time period, at least nine additional works (see for example, Hsu & McDowall, 2017; Hsu, Vasquez, & McDowall, 2018; Lasley & Guffey, 2017; Mandala, 2017; Mandala & Freilich, 2017, 2018; Romyn & Kebbell, 2018; St. George, 2017; Yang & Jen, 2017) were published using SCP to study terrorism.…”

“…We did so partially because of the availability of these data, as opposed to comparing weapon use across suicide attacks and nonattacked targets as it would be difficult to identify matched nonattacked targets. Mandala and Freilich (2017), as noted, also tested MURDEROUS by examining whether simple and easy-to-use weapons like guns, as opposed to explosives, are more likely to be associated with a successful terrorist attack (i.e., assassination). Data for these attributes are readily available.…”

Assessing nation‐state‐sponsored cyberattacks using aspects of Situational Crime Prevention

“…Similarly, weapons that are are more likely to be used in acts of terror should be undetectable or difficult to notice, easily transported, cause substantive harm, provide enjoyment in use, exhibit reliability, are user-friendly with minimal training, and are relatively safe for the user, such as guns in the United States. Limited evidence suggests that strategies to intervene in offenders' access to weapons of this nature can help reduce the threat of terror (Legault & Hendrickson, 2009;Mandala & Freilich, 2017). Clarke and Newman (2006) also emphasize understanding the ways that tools are employed by terrorists and extremists.…”