How has the frequency of non-Islamic terror attacks changed since 2001?
Executive summary
Since 2001 the global landscape of terrorism has shifted: datasets and scholars show that, once civil-conflict trends are controlled for, the post‑9/11 era has been less “terror‑prone” than the years before 2001 [1], even as Islamist‑inspired violence surged in certain regions after 2012‑13 [2] [3]; at the same time, in specific countries such as the United States the share — and in some periods the absolute incidence — of non‑Islamic terrorism (notably right‑wing domestic terrorism) has risen and accounted for the majority of extremist killings in recent years [4] [5].
1. Global trends: fewer countries experiencing terrorism, but regional shifts
Comprehensive efforts to measure attacks since 1970 — exemplified by the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and syntheses such as Our World in Data — show large geographic variation: many countries have seen declines in terrorist activity since 2001 while others, especially in parts of Africa and the Middle East, have witnessed sharp rises tied to local conflicts and to the expansion of Islamist groups after 2012‑13 [6] [7] [8] [2].
2. The academic verdict: post‑9/11 was overall less “terror‑prone” than the pre‑2001 era
Rigorous statistical work finds that, once the prevalence of civil wars and similar conflicts is accounted for, countries were significantly more likely to experience terrorism prior to or during 2001 than since — one study estimates non‑conflict countries were upwards of 60% more likely to have terrorist incidents before 2001 than afterward [1].
3. Islamist terrorism rose in intensity and geographic reach after 2012, reshaping the mix
Multiple analyses document an undeniable expansion of Islamist terrorist activity from about 2012 onwards — increasing casualties and geographic diffusion in West Africa, the Sahel, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere — and producing a high absolute number of attacks and deaths in those affected countries [2] [3]. This surge altered the global share of attacks attributable to Islamist groups, even while global patterns varied by region [8] [3].
4. Non‑Islamic terrorism in the United States: a growing share and a deadly trend
In the U.S., while overall terrorist attacks remain relatively few, reporting and government assessments show that right‑wing and other non‑Islamic ideologically motivated attackers became the dominant source of extremist killings in recent years: analyses covering 2014–2023 attribute about 76% of extremist‑related killings to right‑wing extremism and U.S. government reviews since 2018 have highlighted white supremacist violence as the majority of lethal domestic extremist incidents [4] [5].
5. Data caveats and definitional pitfalls that shape apparent trends
Comparisons over time are complicated: the GTD was expanded and re‑coded after 1997 and has evolving inclusion criteria and media‑source coverage, which means counts can reflect changing methods as much as changing reality [6]; media‑based global compilations likewise undercount attacks in poorly covered areas and can bias perceived trends [8] [6].
6. Synthesis: what “frequency of non‑Islamic attacks” really means since 2001
Answering the narrow question depends on scale: globally, non‑Islamic terrorism as a component of overall terrorism has generally diminished in relative importance where Islamist groups expanded, and overall country‑level risk appears lower than in the pre‑2001 era when conflicts are controlled for [1] [2]; yet in specific national contexts — most clearly the United States — non‑Islamic attacks, particularly right‑wing domestic terrorism, grew as a share of incidents and fatalities in the 2010s and early 2020s, becoming the principal domestic terrorist threat in those settings [4] [5]. Any definitive statement must acknowledge data‑collection changes in GTD and the regionally uneven nature of the trends [6] [7].