Explaining East-Central Europe's Low Level of Terrorist Activities Compared to Western Europe

Abstract

The aim of this Master's thesis is to explain the seemingly relatively low extent of terrorist activity in the eastern central European states of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary between 1991 and 2019. The region has been comparatively little studied regarding terrorism. Using a variety of data from the GTD database and the UN Population database, statistical methods are used in this Master's thesis to examine the extent of terrorism in European states and predefined regions relative to their populations. The results demonstrate that, on a weighted average per million inhabitants, nine times as many people were killed by terrorist activities in Western Europe as in the four east-central European states. To examine this in more detail, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany as well as the four east-central European states were examined regarding jihadist and rightwing terrorism. A more detailed analysis of the statistical results showed that the differences between the individual states were at least as significant as those between the defined regions. The structured focused comparison of the eight states demonstrated that political opportunities for members of radical social movements could, at least in part, explain the differences in the extent of terrorist activities between the...