The Historiography of Terrorism in Jordan: A Time-Series Analysis

The Historiography of Terrorism in Jordan: A Time-Series Analysis Saud Al-Sharafat (bio) Introduction Bordered by Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Palestine, "Jordan's geopolitical location makes it extremely fragile to spillovers1 of regional events and violent extremism on the rise in the region."2 One of the negative effects of these events was the destabilization of the old social and economic paradigms of Jordanian society, which led to the creation of disaffected ideological groups that only found violent extremism, hatred, and terrorism as the ways to express themselves. Throughout its history, Jordan has faced various waves of terrorism, from leftist and nationalist to contemporary Jihadi-Salafist groups. [End Page 1] Jordan became subject to violent waves of extremism that resulted mainly from the Arab-Israeli conflict. Accordingly, Jordan experienced the first terrorist assassination (first blood) in its history when King Abdullah I was assassinated by a Palestinian Muslim fanatic on Friday, July 20, 1951, outside the al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem."3 Since then, Jordan witnessed 132 terrorist operations resulting in 156 fatalities, 16 of them through the assassination "modus operandi." On top of the list were two of the most important heads of the Jordanian ministries and 6 senior diplomats, including 3 ambassadors in Western Europe.4 Considering such a situation, this article seeks to examine the historiography of the terrorism phenomenon and its future in Jordan by analyzing the terrorism operations index5 in all its typology and perpetrators. These operations6 match our definition of terrorism: "The threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation."7 To quantify the terrorism phenomenon in Jordan, the author applied the Least Squares method (LS) to the Time Series Analysis by SPSS Statistics.8 The dataset is drawn mainly from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), which [End Page 2] monitors terrorist operations in the world from 1970 until 2018.9 Furthermore, the article applied a terrorism index model developed by the author under the name "Alternative Terrorism Index-S" (ATI-S), which consists of (27) indexes.10 As in most contemporary academic related literature on terrorism, the methodology for the article database is almost the same, with some differences in terms of reliance on open sources database.11 Whereby it includes some memoirs and biographies of some Jordanian politicians and historians, albeit a few. In addition, the author benefited from his personal experience in the ‎General Intelligence Directorate (GID) that extended over almost three decades ‎‎(1986–2015), with most of it in ‎the field of counter-terrorism‏ and Jihadi-Islamist groups. The use of Time Series Analysis (TSA) is not new in terrorism literature,12 in the Western cognitive system,13 and is still a useful approach to analyzing the phenomenon. However, what is new about this article is that there is no previous literature about the use of TSA in Jordan to the best of the author's knowledge. Despite the long history of the phenomenon of terrorism in Jordan, the literature on terrorism did not witness interest in publication until after the attacks of September 11, 2001. This is "a worldwide lack of attention parallels terrorism place in academia."14 Of the 61 books and studies reviewed by Henrik Gråtrud (2020), none had been published before 2001. Gråtrud's works offer almost the [End Page 3] first comprehensive review of the literature on terrorism in Jordan.15 I agree with him when he describes previous literature saying ("While outstanding work has been done on jihadism in Jordan – particularly on the movement's history and leaders such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi – jihadist plotting in the Kingdom is understudied. There is no comprehensive study on the topic. Worse still, there is not even an analysis of all the attacks that have occurred in the country, and the main explanation for the literature's shortcomings is that it has been too inward-looking").16 These works often lack a conceptual, let alone empirically-based, foundation for understanding terrorists and their acts of violence. I think it...