The purpose of this study is to provide a general trends in recent terrorism in North
America and Europe over the last five years. In particular the terrorism which occurred after
2012 shows the transition in trends as terrorists attacks civilians and public places(soft target)
rather than targeting national facilities or specific people. For instance, the Parris terror attack
and Barcelona vehicle attack shows this changes clearly. The terrorists appeared to attack
ordinary people in urban places with high population density.
Although the trends are changing, there are still few studies focusing on the current
situation, and most of the previous studies have focused on changing in strategies and
counter-terrorism in each country after the 9.11 terror. Meanwhile, studies examining the
trends of terrorism have been limited to analyzing few cases or using relatively monolithic
data of Global Terrorism Data(GTD). While the types of terrorism that occur recent years
including ‘new terrorism’ in many respects, it seems to be difficult to classify with GTD
data and/or case studies. Therefore, it is necessary to construct new data that perhaps grasp
the recent trend of terrorism from different perspectives.
In this point of view, this Based on this, this study collects terrorism data from North
America and Europe for the past five years, by using the National Intelligence Service’s
annual report on terrorism as a sampling framework and analyse the trends and changes.
The result shows similarities in the methods of attack, and the type of weapon they used.
As vehicle attacks has been raised in few years, damage area has been widen and casualties
also have been increased.