The importance of cultural and social proximity for the cross-border impacts of terrorist attacks

ABSTRACT

Over the past two decades, social science research has repeatedly shown that societies tend to be affected more by a foreign event when it occurs in a geographically, culturally, and/or socially proximate location. The extant terrorism literature, however, has thus far mainly focused on the role played by geographical proximity in the creation of terrorist attacks' cross–border impacts, thereby largely ignoring the possible importance of cultural and social proximity. In this paper, we therefore investigate both whether and why cultural and/or social proximity between an audience country and the locus of a foreign terrorist attack increases the latter's impact on the former. We do this by conducting an in–depth exploratory case study of the impacts of seven foreign terrorist attacks on American public debates about domestic affairs. Overall, we find strong evidence that both cultural and social proximity increased a foreign terrorist incident's impact on American public debates. These findings suggest (1) that the concept of proximity should be more systematically integrated into the terrorism literature and (2) that a broader conception of proximity is needed. On top of this, our study also offers some insight into the possible mechanisms that drive these observed proximity effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorist attacks
• cross-border impact
• event characteristics
• cultural and social proximity
• public debates
• exploratory case study

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants of the Politicologenetmaal 2021 conference for their helpful comments on a draft version of this paper. We are also grateful for the insightful feedback provided by two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Terrorist attacks that matched these selection criteria but which occurred inside the US were not included in the final sample.

2 Other approaches include analysing parliamentary debates and political parties’ election manifestos (De Wilde, 2011; De Wilde et al., 2016).

3 Other search terms were considered (i.e. ‘[country of attack]+attack’ and ‘[city of attack]’), but were generally found to yield either no additional relevant news articles or too many irrelevant articles.

4 Indeed, a quick search of the online archives of the four newspapers revealed that the vast majority of articles about a foreign terrorist attack tended to be published in the first week following its occurrence, which suggests that this is the period in which an event’s main social and political impacts are created.

5 It is important to note that a significant degree of overlap exists between domesticating and implication-inferring statements. After all, when an actor argues that attitudes, ideas, policies, or institutions in the US should or should not change in response to a foreign terrorist attack, she or he is also automatically linking the attack to a domestic public debate. The reverse of this is not true though: not every statement in which a foreign terrorist attack is linked to American domestic affairs includes a call for change or continuity (see the Appendix for an example).

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or non-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Olaf Knoester

Olaf Knoester is a PhD candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM, Bilthoven, the Netherlands), where he investigates public involvement in research. Most of the work for the present study took place when he was an MSc student in Political Science at the Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands).

Thijs van Dooremalen

Thijs van Dooremalen is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Sociological Research (KU Leuven, Belgium). His central research topic is the sociology of events. He is particularly interested in the questions how and why events can cause transformations within national public spheres (media, politics, policy making). In his PhD thesis, he analysed this for the case of 9/11 in the United States, France, and the Netherlands.