Global Terrorism Report "EMPOWER IAS"

News:

• NITI Aayog has questioned the methodology adopted by the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2019 to rank India as the seventh-worst terrorism.

 

About the Global Terrorism Index (GTI):

• The Global Terrorism Index (GTI) is a comprehensive study analysing the impact of terrorism for 163 countries and which covers 99.7 per cent of the world’s population.
• The Global Terrorism Index (GTI) is a report published annually by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), a global think tank headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
• The index provides a comprehensive summary of the key global trends and patterns in terrorism since 2000. It produces a composite score in order to provide an ordinal ranking of countries on the impact of terrorism.

 

Finding of 2019 index:

• Deaths from terrorism fell for the fourth consecutive year, after peaking in 2014. Afghanistan has replaced Iraq as the country most affected by terrorism.
• India has moved to the seventh position from the previous year’s eighth in the annual Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2019. The countries ahead of it are Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria, Pakistan and Somalia. 
• Jammu and Kashmir remained the regions most impacted by terrorism in 2018, with 321 attacks, resulting in 123 deaths, most of which were perpetrated by Islamist groups. The three most active groups remained Hizbul Mujahideen, Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). Both JeM and LeT have also been active in Pakistan and Afghanistan, though most of their attacks are carried out in India. 
• The second most impacted region was Chhattisgarh, in the centre of the red corridor. Chhattisgarh suffered 138 attacks in 2018, resulting in 123 deaths all from Maoist extremists. 

 

Criteria:

• In order to be included as an incident in the Global Terrorism Database, the act has to
• be ‘an intentional act of violence or threat of violence by a non-state actor.’ This means an incident has to meet three criteria in order for it to be counted as a terrorist act:
  • The incident must be intentional - the result of a conscious calculation on the part of a perpetrator.
  • The incident must entail some level of violence or threat of violence - including property damage as well as violence against people.
  • The perpetrators of the incidents must be sub-national actors. This database does not include acts of state terrorism.

 

In addition to this baseline definition, two of the following three criteria have to be met in order to be included in the START database from 1997:

 

• The violent act was aimed at attaining a political, economic, religious or social goal.
• The violent act included evidence of an intention to coerce, intimidate or convey some other message to a larger audience other than to the immediate victims.
• The violent act was outside the precepts of international humanitarian law.