Terrorism in Egypt: a comprehensive spatial, spatio-temporal, and statistical analysis

Abstract

Terrorist attacks epitomize a direct threat to the security of Middle Eastern citizens as well as global stability. As one of the Middle Eastern countries, Egypt suffers from terrorism in terms of human life and economic loss. Studying the spatial distribution of terrorist attacks and factors that may affect their frequency is critical for understanding this violent behavior and hel** decision-makers fight terrorism. This study examines the spatial distribution of terrorist attacks in Egypt between 2004 and 2019 and its correlated factors. To fulfill this aim, spatial and spatiotemporal analyses were applied to analyze terrorist attack hotspots in the country, and 14 geographical, natural, social, and economic factors were tested for significant correlation to terrorist attacks by utilizing statistical and geographical weighted regression (GWR) analysis. Spatial distribution analysis results for the whole study period revealed two main hotspots: one in Greater Cairo, the capital of Egypt, and the second in the North Sinai Peninsula. There were additional small hotspots in Alexandria City, the Nile Delta region, and the northern part of the Nile Delta. The statistical analysis concluded a significant positive correlation between terrorist attacks and the fragile state index, education index, precipitation, distance to the land boundary, population density, poverty index, economic freedom index, and unemployment rate. Whereas, freedom index and distance to maritime boundaries had a significant negative correlation with terrorist attacks. GWR revealed significant positive correlations between terrorist attacks and NTL, population density, precipitation, and temperature in the North Sinai Governorate. The same governorate showed a negative correlation between terrorist attacks from one side and topography and drought index from the other.

Appendix

See Figs. 

Fig. 9

The plan for how the bibliometric analysis was done, based on how the VOSviewer software was used to do the analysis (Karmaoui et al., 2022). The plan is based on the Scopus database from 2010 to 2022. The bibliometric data source was extracted from the online version of the Scopus database. The search query was chosen to serve the primary goal of this study as “TITLE-ABS-KEY (“terrorist attack” OR “Terrorism" OR “terrorist systems “ OR “terrorist incident” OR “terrorist group” OR “Global Terrorism” OR “terrorist events “AND “spatial” OR “spatiotemporal” OR “geospatial statistics” OR “GIS” OR “Time Cube Models” OR “Optimized Hot Spot Analysis” OR “Geographically Weighted Regression” OR “GWR” OR “Ordinary Least Squares (OLS)” OR “spatial autocorrelation”)

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Fig. 10

Keywords co-occurrence network the context of the studied subject a Network visualization by cluster b Overlay visualization by average publication date (Note: circle = keyword; circle diameter = frequency of a keyword appearance in the articles; color in (a) = cluster group; color in (b) = average publication year of the article that used the keywords). The (co-occurrence) keyword analysis selected 458 keywords (big and small circles) grouped in 6 clusters in different colors, as presented in Fig. 10a. Keywords that are recused regularly, which articles are intensely focused on, with outstanding inter-connection strength with other keywords are: Terrorism (163), terrorist attack (39) Spatiotemporal Analysis (31), Spatial Analysis (29), Human (28), GIS (26), In addition, the co-occurrence timeline visualization map over the last years (see Fig. 10b) enunciates the most recent emerging topics with a yellow color, including spatiotemporal analysis, spatial analysis, spatial distribution, and demographics, with an average publication year of 2018. Most important is that the analysis highlights that the number of studies on terrorism and terrorist attacks (red in Fig. 10a) is large and can be considered a relatively new or hot research topic for the vibrant research community

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Fig. 11

a Network visualization map of collaborative networks among countries in the investigated field of research. Each node represents a given country, and its size is relative to the number of published papers. b A network visualization map of the most cited journals concerning the research subject. Each node represents a journal name, and its size is relative to the number of articles in each country. The database shows that a total of 37 countries contributed to the literature. The country with the highest number of publications and collaborations with other states is the United States of America, with 85 documents, followed by China (37), the United Kingdom (26), Australia (10), the Russian Federation (7), and India (7). We note that authors in the United States of America have significant links with China and the United Kingdom, as well as European countries such as Sweden, Italy, Denmark, and Greece that have links to the United Kingdom and China. Figure 11b depicts a bibliographic network analysis of 25 prominent journals interested in the investigated subject regarding the source of publications. The analysis demonstrated that the proceedings of spie, the International Society for Optical Engineering and Risk Analysis, are highly productive journals with 25 research papers, lecture notes in computer science (5), the ISPRS international journal of geo-information (3), defense and peace economics (3), social science and medicine (3), applied geography (2), Wuhan daxue xuebao (xinxi kexue ban)/geomatics and information science of Wuhan University (2), It is expected that this information can assist researchers in choosing the most relevant, valid, and reliable journal to publish their findings

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