A sociological approach to global terrorism

Abstract

In this work we approach terrorism from the perspective of war studies. To do this, we analyze the relationships between terrorism and a series of socio-structural factors. These factors consist of indices obtained from different international organizations, such as human development (IHL-D), poverty, corruption, immigration, etc. In addition, we developed a descriptive terrorist profile using a sample of 667 terrorists. These open-source data have been obtained from the media and bibliography. Our main aim is to confirm that it is possible to replicate a terrorist profile, similar to that developed by other researchers using restricted- access data but using exclusively open-source data. Our results indicate that open-source based terrorist profiling is possible and leads to similar results than those based on restricted-access data. In the context of sociology, research on sensitive topics such as terrorism is mostly limited to restricted information sources that are difficult to access. We show that it is possible to carry out sociological research on information circulating the internet given that it has been duly verified. We believe this will facilitate future research about terrorism and similar topics. Finally, in line with previous restricted-data based profiles, our open-access based profile highlights that terrorism is independent of poverty but it is related to less developed societies with a high perception of corruption and injustice.