Continuing with the nineteenth and second to last lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/
This lecture continues the discussion of terrorism, a subject we often deliberately avoid. We actually don’t even have a category for terrorism on the blog, in part because I consider it a tool of an insurgency, not a separate form of warfare.
On the first slide is a paper on the determinants of media attention for terrorist attacks. This is a significant subject as terrorism does rely on media attention to make their points. If there was no coverage……then the terrorist act would be relatively ineffective. The purpose of terrorism is not to kill people, it is to attract attention. Modern international terrorism started with the Palestinian Black September attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972, which turned the Palestinian issue from a Middle East concern into an issue that now garnered world wide attention.
Anyhow, the lecture starts with a paper by Michael Jetter, which is linked to on page 1 (one of the very nice things about this lecture series is that all the various papers he discusses are linked in the lecture…providing a extensive collection of interesting and useful papers to read). The question is “…why do some attacks generate more coverage than others do?” The answer is on slides 10 and 12, but the short answer is: attacks in wealthier countries, countries that trade with the U.S., that are closer to the U.S. get more coverage (in the New York Times).
Not sure how really meaningful this is except to note that obviously, terrorist attacks in Canada are going to get a lot more attention in the U.S. newspapers than terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka.
Anyhow, this is going to turn into a two-part posting, so will do the rest later this week. The link to his lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2019.pdf
