Forecasting the Locational Dynamics of Transnational Terrorism: A Network Analytic Approach

Efforts to combat and prevent transnational terrorism rely, to a great extent, on the effective allocation of security resources. Critical to the success of this allocation process is the identification of the likely geopolitical sources and targets of terrorism. We construct the network of transnational terrorist attacks, in which source (sender) and target (receiver) countries share a directed edge, and we evaluate a network analytic approach to forecasting the geopolitical sources and targets of terrorism. We integrate a deterministic, similarity-based, link prediction framework [1] into a probabilistic modeling approach [2] in order to develop an edge-forecasting method. Using a database of over 12,000 transnational terrorist attacks occurring between 1968 and 2002 [3], we show that probabilistic link prediction is not only capable of accurate forecasting during a terrorist campaign, but is a promising approach to forecasting the onset of terrorist hostilities between a source and a target.