Shifting landscape of terrorism: A 50‐year spatiotemporal analysis

Abstract This study aims to analyze the spatiotemporal evolutionary characteristics of global terrorism from 1970 to 2020, providing a comprehensive understanding of its dynamics and patterns. The research seeks to fill gaps in existing literature by integrating geographic perspectives and methods to enhance the understanding of terrorism's spatial and temporal dimensions. The study employs a multi‐methodological approach, combining the Mann–Kendall trend test, spatial autocorrelation analysis, kernel density estimation, and standard deviational ellipse. These methods are applied to data from 176 countries, covering 171,327 terrorist incidents recorded in the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) from 1970 to 2020. Pertinent findings are as follows. Temporally, global terrorism risk has evolved significantly over the past five decades and involves four distinct stages, i.e., emerging stage (1970–1991), descending stage (1992–2000), rampant stage (2001–2014), and attenuating stage (2015–2020). Meanwhile, 117 countries show an increasing trend, and 56 countries show a decreasing trend in terrorism risk. Spatially, the distribution of global terrorism is characterized by clustering and aggregation, with a constant shift in the gravity center and dominant direction. In addition, the spatial hotspots of global terrorism are predominantly presented as “two major core circles and multiple sub‐centers.”