Effect on Terrorism

72% Reduction in Worldwide Terrorism

Ordinarily, no single nation suffers from constant terrorist attack. The only way to determine if terrorism can be reduced, therefore, is to mount a worldwide study. On a global scale, terrorist attacks are common and it is possible to detect reductions associated with peace-creating assemblies. The Rand Corporation, an independent think tank, provided the data on terrorist attacks around the world (due to the wide fluctuations characteristic of terrorism data, time series analysis was performed on the data in the natural log scale). A study of the three largest peace-creating assemblies ever held in the West, comparing the weeks of those assemblies as against all the other weeks in a two-year study, revealed a worldwide reduction in fatalities and injuries due to terrorism of 72%. During those three assemblies, when the number of peace-creating experts approached or exceeded 7,000, there was also a significant decrease in international conflict of all types. The study used time series analysis to rule out the possibility that the reduction in terrorism was due to pre-existing cycles, trends, or drifts in the data, or to seasonal changes (Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, in press).