Between 2013 and 2014, deaths from terrorism worldwide jumped from 18,111 to 32,765. That was the largest year-on-year rise ever recorded. The Global Terrorism Index recorded it in its 2015 edition.
The index is an annual report from the Institute for Economics and Peace, developed by the institute’s founder, IT entrepreneur Steve Killelea. It ranks countries by how much terrorism has hit them, not by how much terrorism they produce. Early editions drew on the Global Terrorism Database kept by START, a research consortium at the University of Maryland. That database has coded more than 190,000 cases across 163 countries.
How a country gets its score
Four things go into a yearly score: the number of incidents, deaths, injuries and the approximate level of property damage. Deaths carry the most weight. Property damage is sorted into bands, and most incidents are coded as unknown damage, which scores nothing. A five-year weighted average is then applied, because the effects of an attack on a society last well beyond the year it happens.
One awkward point: there is no single accepted definition of terrorism. The index once borrowed START’s, which describes the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a state or non-state actor to reach a political, economic, religious or social goal through fear, coercion or intimidation. It is not clear the report still uses that wording.
What the editions found
The 2014 edition found that deaths had risen five-fold from 2000 to 2013, to about 18,000. Explosives were used in 60 per cent of attacks and firearms in 30 per cent. More than half of all attacks killed nobody, and only 10 per cent claimed more than five lives.
The 2015 edition reported terrorist activity up 80 per cent in 2014. Nigeria saw deaths rise by more than 300 per cent, to 7,512. ISIS and Boko Haram together accounted for 51 per cent of all terrorism deaths that year. In the West, lone wolf attacks made up 70 per cent of terrorist deaths since 2006.
By 2016 the picture had eased slightly. Deaths fell by ten per cent in 2015, the first decline since 2010, though the 29,376 recorded still made it the second deadliest year on record. Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria accounted for 72 per cent of the deaths. In OECD countries, deaths rose by 650 per cent against 2014, with most in Turkey and France.
The fifth edition, published in November 2017, found deaths down for a second year running, a 22 per cent drop from the 2014 peak. Yet 106 countries suffered at least one attack, an all-time high, and OECD countries accounted for one percent of global deaths, up from 0.1 percent in 2010.
The cost
The institute also prices terrorism. It put the global economic impact at US$89.6 billion in 2015, 15 percent below the 2014 peak of US$105.6 billion. Its estimates leave out the cost of fear and of counterterrorism spending. The report ties the peaks to September 11 in 2001, to the Iraq war in 2007, and to a third wave from 2012 driven by Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
The twelfth edition of the index came out in March 2026.
