Scale Invariance in Global Terrorism

Traditional analyses of international terrorism have not sought to explain the emergence of rare but extremely severe events. Using the tools of extremal statistics to analyze the set of terrorist attacks worldwide between 1968 and 2004, as compiled by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), we find that the relationship between the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks exhibits the “scale-free” property with an exponent of close to two. This property is robust, even when we restrict our analysis to events from a single type of weapon or events within major industrialized nations. We also find that the distribution of event sizes has changed very little over the past 37 years, suggesting that scale invariance is an inherent feature of global terrorism.