Detecting seasonal variations in terrorist-related violence: the case of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir (1988–2018)

The terrorist insurgency that has ravaged the Indian-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir since the late 1980s has, unsurprisingly, attracted a huge amount of scholarly attention over the course of the past few decades. The primary focus of the discourse has been on explaining how and why the militancy broke out in the first place, and what set of policy decisions, or indecisions, have aggravated the problem further. However, there has been limited attempt to observe and explain, longitudinally, the frequency and level of violence that has occurred since the beginning of the terrorist insurgency. This paper, drawing upon the well-known ‘temperature-aggression’ theory, which purports that higher temperatures lead to people exhibiting higher levels of aggression, seeks to test whether higher mean monthly temperatures in the Indian-administered territory of Jammu and Kashmir have corresponded with higher rates of terrorist-related violence, both in terms of incidents (frequency) and causalities (level).