The scale of violence in western Europe to date this summer has shocked Europeans and the world alike. But when put in a global and historical context, the figures and headlines quickly give us a different perspective on the global proliferation of terrorism and its victims.

Figures from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) show that since 2012 there has been a dramatic rise in the number of deaths from terrorist attacks across the world. In western Europe, however, the figure has decreased since the early 1990s.

David Miller, professor of sociology at the University of Bath, says: “The figures would tend to suggest that there is much less of a threat from terrorism overall now than there was then.

“I think we pay more attention to it because it’s happening here [western Europe] and not there. People point to the fact that there are many more people dying outside the west and we just don’t think about them as they’re not ‘worthy victims’.

“Especially they’re not worthy victims if they are killed by our allies as opposed to by our enemies and that is a perennial problem.”

Deaths as a result of terrorism in Western Europe and the rest of the world Deaths due to terrorism have greatly risen across the world since 2012.

The greatest number of deaths from terrorist-related attacks in the 1980s and 1990s in western Europe were often localised, focused attacks by groups like the Irish Republican Army (IRA) or one-off incidents with high death tolls, like the Lockerbie bombing in 1988.

Today western Europe is typically experiencing a higher number of attacks with lower death tolls.

Other than atrocities like those in Paris in November 2015, where 136 people lost their lives in a series of coordinated attacks across the French capital, the acts of violence that have flared up across Europe have usually resulted in fewer deaths than the mass killings seen during the 1980s.

Also, where the IRA and other terrorist organisations in the past had a single aim targeted at the UK, Islamic State is inspiring a wave of homegrown jihadists across the world to engage in violence. The potential origins and targets of terrorism are far greater than that seen in the 1980s and 90s.

Deaths as a result of terrorism in Western Europe The number of deaths as a result of terrorism in western Europe has declined since the 1980s and 1990s.

But fundamentally the question of what counts as terrorism itself is fraught. There are more than 200 definitions of terrorism and the count of people killed by acts of terrorism is frequently contested.

“It’s a question of political strategy and of course you can come up with an agreement on how to define it in academic debate. The problem is it’s used as a means for denouncing violence which you don’t approve of,” said Miller.

The GTD, which is the most comprehensive source of figures on global terrorism is collated from public sources of information by academics at the University of Maryland. However, it doesn’t, for example, include deaths of civilians in state-backed violence, such as those killed by British forces in Northern Ireland or by allied forces in Iraq – a decision some dispute.

“The problem with terrorist studies in academia is that after all these years and the 70s and 80s is that they have no idea why people take up arms and that is because they don’t want to put it into the wider context of the actions of states … It’s difficult to understand how these things happen unless you see it in the context of wider geopolitics,” Miller added.