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Abstract:
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The World Trade Center attacks exposed the dark side of globalization revealing the ease with which terrorists can finance, plan, and execute attacks from around the world. The terrorist threat itself is different from that of preceding generations, and the relationship between this new terrorism and concurrent technological and cultural modernization should be examined independently of terrorism of the past. This work does not attempt to speculate on the root causes of terrorism, but a review of psychological, rational choice, and structural theories demonstrates that globalization is a logical enabler of terrorism in all three popular theories. Using measures of technological connectivity, transnational contact, and economic integration, I compare a fixed effect Tobit model and a fixed effects Probit model to reveal the relationship between these aspects of globalization and the prevalence of terrorist incidents around the world. |