Measuring country image in terrorism reports: evidence from Pakistan

Since 2001, global terrorism has become one of the principal international challenges of the world. According to United Nations; on average, there were 981 terrorist attacks, triggering 2361 deaths, and wounding 2943 people per month, internationally in 2015. Pakistan stranded the third most terrorist attack country in 2015 with 1009 terrorist attacks and 1081 deaths (https://​www.​state.​gov/​j/​ct/​rls/​crt/​2015/​257526.​htm). Terrorist attacks damage the countries tangible and intangible assets. After a terrorist attack every country tries to manage its country image through terrorism reports/news. Though, there is no logical evaluation model to measure whether the country image is effectively made through terrorism reports or not. This study undergoes with the expert respondent interviews to define the levels of elements which affect the country image in terrorism reports. By taking Pakistan as a case study and founded on Analytic Hierarchy Process techniques the country image mathematical and conceptual model for terrorism reports has been developed along with evaluation impact indexes. Thus, this study provides a significant and quantitative way to measure the country image in terrorism reports, and it will also help the future researchers to remove the biases while measuring significant country image quantitatively; which they face in qualitative research.