Terrorism: civil wars, terrorist groups’ ideologies, and Africa

This article introduces the contents of the special issue. Following general remarks, we briefly review some essential background concepts including internal (civil) wars, terrorist attacks, domestic versus transnational terrorist attacks, terrorist groups, and their four basic ideologies. The trends of those concepts are displayed using time-series data drawn from event datasets. A brief summary of each of the six articles is provided, highlighting each article’s main contribution. When possible, individual articles are grouped and related to one another.