Although most attacks occur in North Sinai, there is a risk of terrorist attacks across the country. Attacks could be indiscriminate, affecting Egyptian security forces, religious sites, large public gatherings and places visited by foreigners.
There is a heightened threat of terrorist attacks in or around religious sites and during religious festivals, such as the month of Ramadan and the Christmas period including Coptic Christmas , when terrorist groups have sometimes called for attacks. Terrorist attacks have occurred over local holiday weekends. Terrorists have attacked tourists in Egypt in the past. There is a heightened threat of terrorist attacks targeting Coptic Christians from extremists linked to Daesh-Sinai in Egypt.
You should follow the advice of Egyptian authorities, remaining particularly vigilant and maintaining a high level of security awareness in crowded places and at large gatherings. You can find a list of holidays on the British Embassy Cairo website. The authorities in Egypt maintain a significant security presence across the country, including armed security officers stationed at important sites, critical infrastructure, and road checkpoints.
Extra measures are in place at tourist sites. There are frequent reports of terrorist attacks in North Sinai. Most attacks are in the northeast corner of the governorate between Al-Arish city and the border with Gaza, but the whole of the North Sinai governorate is at risk.
Learn how to better deal with bad world news. Talk through your feelings around terrorism on the ReachOut Forums.
If you're finding it really tough to process stuff around terrorism, think about getting some professional help. Explore other topics It's not always easy to find the right place to start. What's on your mind? Frederic Lemieux does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
One victim was just eight years old. Because the media often sensationalizes terrorism and authorities tend to oversimplify it, demystifying common misconceptions about why individuals carry out political violence is important. We asked a professor at Georgetown University to answer three common questions about terrorism and political violence.
Rather, terrorism is a tactic — a strategy used to achieve a specific end. This strategy is often used in asymmetric power struggles when a weaker person, or group, is fighting against a powerful nation-state. The violence is aimed at creating fear in the targeted population and often provokes prompt and violent response from the state. Acts of terrorism followed by violent crackdowns can become a cycle that is difficult to disrupt.
Recently, terrorist groups have begun using the internet and the media to spread fear and affect public opinion. The Islamic State uses the internet to recruit followers.
In most countries the probability of being in a terrorist attack is very low: terrorism accounts for less than 0. Terrorism receives media attention which is disproportionate to its frequency and share of deaths. This is also the intention of terrorists.
But they are very successful hijacking global news cycles. But media coverage of terrorism is also highly unequal: some events receive a lot of attention while most receive very little. Which are the characteristics that influence whether an attack is covered in the media or not?
A previous study which looked at terrorist attacks in the US from to found they received more attention if there were fatalities; airlines were a target; it was a hijacking; or organized by a domestic group. In a recent study, researchers looked at the differences in media coverage of terrorist events in the US from to They assessed how these factors affected the amount of coverage attacks received in the US media.
In this study the authors define five major news sources as CNN. It appeared to play less of a role for local outlets.
From this analysis we also see that media coverage was higher when the perpetrator was arrested partly because an arrest is a reportable event in itself ; the target of the attack was law enforcement or government; and when people were killed in the attack.
Which events do and do not receive media coverage matter: evidence shows that media plays a defining role in shifting public opinion; perceptions of the importance of particular issues; and national policy conversations. In particular, increased coverage when a perpetrator is Muslim presents an unbalanced overview of US terrorism to the public.
In the dataset that this study relied on, Muslims perpetrated Combined with the fact that terrorism in general gets a disproportionate amount of media attention, the fact that the worst attacks — those that cause the greatest number of deaths — get most attention further exacerbates public fear. One of the primary motivations for our work at Our World in Data is to provide a fact-based overview of the world we live in — a perspective that includes the persistent and long-term changes that run as a backdrop to our daily lives.
We aim to provide the complement to the fast-paced reporting we see in the news. The media provides a near-instantaneous snapshot of single events; events that are, in most cases, negative. The persistent, large-scale trends of progress never make the headlines. But is there evidence that such a disconnect exists between what we see in the news and what is reality for most of us?
One study attempted to look at this from the perspective of what we die from: is what we actually die from reflected in the media coverage these topics receive? For each source the authors calculated the relative share of deaths, share of Google searches, and share of media coverage. They restricted the considered causes to the top 10 causes of death in the US and additionally included terrorism, homicide, and drug overdoses.
This allows for us to compare the relative representation across different sources. The coverage in both newspapers here is strikingly similar. And the discrepancy between what we actually die from and what we get informed of in the media is what stands out:. One way to think about it is that media outlets may produce content that they think readers are most interested in, but this is not necessarily reflected in our preferences when we look for information ourselves. As we can see clearly from the chart above, there is a disconnect between what we die from, and how much coverage these causes get in the media.
Another way to summarize this discrepancy is to calculate how over- or underrepresented each cause is in the media. To do this, we simply calculate the ratio between the share of deaths and share of media coverage for each cause. In this chart, we see how over- or underrepresented each cause is in newspaper coverage. Numbers denote the factor by which they are misrepresented.
Homicides are also very overrepresented in the news, by a factor of The most underrepresented in the media are kidney disease fold , heart disease fold , and, perhaps surprisingly, drug overdoses 7-fold. Stroke and diabetes are the two causes most accurately represented.
But there is another important question: should these be representative? The first is that we would expect there to be some preventative aspect to information we access.
There are several examples where I can imagine this to be true. People who are concerned about cancer may search online for guidance on symptoms and be convinced to see their doctor.
Some people with suicidal thoughts may seek help and support online which later results in an averted death from suicide. Some imbalance in the relative proportions therefore makes sense. But clearly there is some bias in our concerns: most people die from heart disease hence it should be something that concerns us yet only a small minority seek [possibly preventative] information online.
Second, this study focused on what people in the USA die from, not what people across the world die from. Is media coverage more representative of global deaths? Not really. The relative ranking of deaths in the USA is reflective of the global average: most people die from heart disease and cancers, and terrorism ranks last or second last alongside natural disasters.
Terrorism accounted for 0. The third relates to the very nature of news: it focuses on events and stories.
Whilst I am often critical of the messages and narratives portrayed in the media, I have some sympathy for what they choose to cover. Reporting has become increasingly fast-paced. Combine this with our attraction to stories and narratives.
The most underrepresented cause of death in the media was kidney disease. But with an audience that expects a minute-by-minute feed of coverage, how much can possibly be said about kidney disease? Without conquering our compulsion for the latest unusual story, we cannot expect this representation to be perfectly balanced.
Media and its consumers are stuck in a reinforcing cycle. The news reports on breaking events, which are often based around a compelling story. We come to expect news updates with increasing frequency, and media channels have clear incentives to deliver. This locks us into a cycle of expectation and coverage with a strong bias for outlier events. Most of us are left with a skewed perception of the world; we think the world is much worse than it is.
The responsibility in breaking this cycle lies with both media producers and consumers. Will we ever stop reporting and reading the latest news? But we can all be more conscious of how we let this news shape our understanding of the world. And journalists can do much better in providing context of the broader trends: if reporting on a homicide, for example, include context of how homicide rates are changing over time.
This requires us to check our often unconscious bias for single narratives and seek out sources that provide a fact-based perspective on the world. This antidote to the news is what we try to provide at Our World in Data. It should be accessible for everyone, which is why our work is completely open-access. Whether you are a media producer or consumer, feel free to take and use anything you find here.
Shares of deaths, media coverage and Google searches over time The interactive charts present the full annual data series published by Shen et al.
Due to data availability Google Trends data only runs from the year to In our research on terrorism we rely on the Global Terrorism Database GTD as a key source of data on incidents and fatalities from terrorism across the world. It does, however, have limitations which we think should be clear before making inferences from trends or signals represented by the data. In the area of terrorism research, there are now multiple databases available which attempt to record and detail terrorist incidents across the world.
We take a more detailed look at the differences in estimates from these three databases here. In it was officially published as an academic output in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence , and since then has been one of the widely used resources within academic research on terrorism. The GTD is therefore well-respected and highly-regarded as a comprehensive data source on global terrorism. The GTD — as with other terrorism databases — are curated through records and analysis of print and electronic media.
We expect that the collation of incidents across the world today and in the recent past is sufficiently complete to understand the global distribution of terrorist incidents and how they have changed over time. A valuable resource which also provides impressive accounts of terrorist incidents across the world is the many detailed entries in Wikipedia by year, by region or by country.
Using this as a cross-reference with the GTD, we have high confidence in the completeness of global data in recent years. Where we have less confidence is the completeness of the data for inferring longer-term changes. The GTD extends back to In their accounts of the GTD, the authors of the database acknowledge that data for this earlier period most likely undercounts the number of terrorist incidents and victims.
The shift to digital media in recent years has made this process much easier. Global records of terrorist incidents — at least in the first half of the dataset — are therefore likely to be an underestimate. We have found no research which attempts to quantify the extent of this underestimate, so we cannot say by how much. We do think some countries or regions — most notably the US and Western Europe — have a high degree of completeness over these decades.
Until the GTD was collated by Pinkerton Global Intelligence Service PGIS which trained US researchers to identify terrorist incidents from reports, governmental records and international media to assess the risk of terrorism for clients. We would expect that this mandate would mean records are skewed towards more complete coverage of incidents in the US and countries with better reporting and records of incidents, such as Western Europe.
But for major incidents, there are closely matched. For other regions we would caution against inferring trends over this complete time period. One key reason we have reservations about the completeness of earlier data is that there are several incidents we would have expected to have featured in the GTD which are not included.
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