TerrorismPutting the wave of Islamist violence in Europe in historical context, perspective
From the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris to the March 2016 attack on Brussels airport to the Bastille Day attack in Nice to the killing of a priest in north-west France, to the spate of violence in Germany, the viciousness of Islamist terrorism in Europe has shocked people in Europe and around the world. Two scholars — one left-leaning, the other a conservative historian – say that when the recent wave of Islamist terrorism in Europe is put in a global and historical context, the figures and headlines suggest a different perspective on the global spread of terrorism and its victims.
From the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris to the March 2016 attack on Brussels airport to the Bastille Day attack in Nice to the killing of a priest in north-west France, to the spate of violence in Germany, the viciousness of Islamist terrorism in Europe has shocked people in Europe and around the world.
Two scholars — one left-leaning, the other a conservative historian – say that when the recent wave of Islamist terrorism in Europe is put in a global and historical context, the figures and headlines suggest a different perspective on the global spread of terrorism and its victims.
David Miller, professor of sociology at the University of Bath, notes that figures from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) show that since 2012 there has been a significant increase the number of people killed in terrorist attacks around the world. In Western Europe, however, the number has decreased since the early 1990s.
Miller told the Guardian that “The figures would tend to suggest that there is much less of a threat from terrorism overall now than there was then.
“I think we pay more attention to it because it’s happening here [Western Europe] and not there. People point to the fact that there are many more people dying outside the West and we just don’t think about them as they’re not ‘worthy victims’.
“Especially they’re not worthy victims if they are killed by our allies as opposed to by our enemies and that is a perennial problem.”
The largest number of people killed in terrorist-related attacks in Western Europe in the 1980s and 1990s was from localized, focused attacks by groups like the Irish Republican Army (IRA) or one-off incidents with high death tolls, like the Lockerbie bombing in 1988.
Miller says that today, Western Europe is typically experiencing a higher number of attacks with lower death tolls.
Other than atrocities like those in Paris in November 2015, in which 136 people lost their lives, and in Nice on 14 July, in which eighty-five people were killed, the acts of Islamist-inspired violence across Europe have usually resulted in fewer deaths than the mass killings seen during the 1980s.
