The Relationship Between Social Service Provision, Militancy, and Violence: Egypt in the 1990s

This study explored the relationship between social service provision and a community’s involvement in terrorism. I used Egypt as a case study to statistically examine whether communities with a greater proportion of fully vaccinated children produced per capita fewer terrorists.

Using The Global Terrorism Database to examine violence between 1990 and 1997 and The Demographic and Health Survey conducted in 1995, I found that, in general, communities with a greater proportion of fully vaccinated children produced fewer terrorists per capita than communities with lower vaccination rates. While demonstrating the correlation between vaccination level and attack rate, I also discovered that terrorists generally preferred to attack close to home, with over fifty percent of attacks occurring within fifty miles of a perpetrator’s hometown.

I examined four Egyptian provinces that represented different combinations of social service provision, and observed the level of violence in each province. While I discovered interesting correlations in three of the provinces, anomalies in the fourth suggested, in this limited sample size at least, that although social services can reduce levels of violence, it would be foolish for any government to believe that simply servicing a region could be preventive against terrorist attacks, since violence can arise from a number of factors.