Country susceptibility to rail infrastructure attacks
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Country susceptibility to rail infrastructure attacks Victor Asal & Kathleen Deloughery & Dan Mabrey
Received: 5 September 2012 / Accepted: 10 September 2012 / Published online: 21 September 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
Abstract Factors that make a state more susceptible to attacks on rail infrastructure are heavily underexplored in the transportation security literature. This study is the first to examine state susceptibility to attacks on rail infrastructure by violent extremist organizations from a quantitative perspective. The most significant finding in this study was that countries that increase ethnic grievance in certain ways were significantly more likely to suffer such attacks. The implications of this finding are important because states that are more likely to ban parties along ethnic lines increase the risk of harm to their most vulnerable populations that often rely on rail for transportation and commerce. Keywords Rail infrastructure . Country level analysis . Terrorism The strong link in people’s imagination between terrorism and attacks on airplanes predates the attacks on September 11th by decades. The week of September 6th 1970, 31 years before the attacks on the United States made this link when three airplanes were hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and flown to Jordan where they were blown up (Raab 2007). After this attack, millions of dollars were spent on protecting air travel (Enders et al. 1990) and since the attacks of September 11th the focus on protecting air travel, and the investment of government resources has only grown (Seidenstat 2004) as has the academic investigation of the targeting and protection of air travel (Enders and Sandler 2004). There has been a very large research effort by scholars examining the effectiveness of counterterrorism measures or trends in attacks against air transport targets (Dugan et al. 2005; Enders and Sandler 2000, 2002; Enders and Sandler 2006; Sandler 2003). By comparison there has been very little research focusing on why and where rail transportation might be targeted even though there are many cases of attacks against V. Asal (*) : K. Deloughery University at Albany SUNY, Albany, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. Deloughery e-mail: [email protected] D. Mabrey University of New Haven, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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railroads and rail travel is inherently vulnerable (Peterman 2005) and attacks on rail have had serious economic and political impacts on societies (Lieberman and Bucht 2009). Indeed “Rail attacks are more numerous and deadly than those on airports and airplanes… (Riley 2004, 3)” It is often forgotten that one of the deadliest terrorist attacks prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks occurred just a month earlier when UNITA killed more than 250 in a train bombing in Angola (Reuters 2007). The attack on the Spanish railway in Madrid on March fourth 2004 underlines the dangers that extremist attacks against railroad targets present to policy mak
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