Does International Tourism Affect Transnational Terrorism?

Studies focusing on the relationship between transnational terrorism and tourism examine the effect of terror on tourism, while this study looks at a different question: does international tourism affect transnational terrorism? We hypothesized that the higher the number of international tourist arrivals to a country, the higher the number of terror attacks, and examined this effect from four distinct aspects: perpetration by foreign attackers against local victims, perpetration by local attackers against foreign victims, perpetration by foreign attackers against foreign victims, and perpetration of terror attacks against foreign private parties. We conclude that there is an inverse U relationship between number of arrivals and number of attacks perpetrated by foreigners, and also a robust significant relationship between number of arrivals to a country and terror attacks in which both the attacker and the victim are foreigners. However, it is not unequivocal whether this is a positive linear or an inverse U relationship.