Making War on the Fabric of Society: A Cross-National Analysis of Terrorism, Urban Public Space and Generalized Social Trust in Europe

Statements by politicians and pundits around the world suggest that terrorism uniquely threatens social order. Unfortunately, our knowledge about how terrorism affects generalized trust and social capital, which many view as foundations of civil society, is quite limited. In this paper we theorize that terrorism damages generalized social trust via its pernicious influence on the perceptions of safety and security in urban public spaces, particularly in those urban places that are the most socially salient to national identity and the most connected to global society (i.e., primate capitals). Using aggregated survey data from European countries in the European Social Survey (Waves 1–6), we find that terrorism, whether committed in urban or rural areas, has no direct effect on social trust. Nonetheless, urban terrorism interacts with urban primacy to arrest the development of generalized social trust. We conclude that the effects of chronic terrorism likely go beyond economics and politics, perhaps damaging the fabric of society itself.