The importance of cultural and social proximity for the cross-border impacts of terrorist attacks

Over the past two decades, social science research has repeatedly shown that societies tend to be affected more by a foreign event when it occurs in a geographically, culturally, and/or socially proximate location. The extant terrorism literature, however, has thus far mainly focused on the role played by geographical proximity in the creation of terrorist attacks' cross-border impacts, thereby largely ignoring the possible importance of cultural and social proximity. In this paper, we therefore investigate both whether and why cultural and/or social proximity between an audience country and the locus of a foreign terrorist attack increases the latter's impact on the former. We do this by conducting an in-depth exploratory case study of the impacts of seven foreign terrorist attacks on American public debates about domestic affairs. Overall, we find strong evidence that both cultural and social proximity increased a foreign terrorist incident's impact on American public debates. These findings suggest (1) that the concept of proximity should be more systematically integrated into the terrorism literature and (2) that a broader conception of proximity is needed. On top of this, our study also offers some insight into the possible mechanisms that drive these observed proximity effects.