Terrorism in Southeast Asia in the post ISIS-era : causes and solutions of terrorism

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the causes and solutions of terrorism in five Southeast Asian Countries, namely Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, and the Philippines in the post ISIS-era. With the review of existing theories on the causes of terrorism, this paper gathers the data the economic performance, government performance, and the prevalence of terrorist incidents from existing databases and analyses the direction and strength amongst the variables by using the Pearson correlation coefficient and t-test. Contrary to the literatures on causes of terrorism, this paper finds that the correlation between the political/economic factors and the prevalence of terrorist incidents is not in a simple linear correlation. With the qualitative and quantitative analysis of each country, this paper argues that the the causes of terrorism indeed depends on the economic and political developmental stage of the country, and argues that political and economic solutions have to be strategized according to the specified circumstances of the country.