By: Dr Fahad Mehmood
China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a part of "One Belt, One Road" Chinese plan of investing more than $50 billion in Pakistan. This project has been dubbed as a “game changer” by Pakistan Prime Minister because of the economic and geo-political implications. However, there are a lot of potential barriers to this project. Besides political, administrative, and environmental hurdles, there are security challenges towards the implementation of the CPEC. A qualitative understanding of risk that serves as a useful foundation exists. It seems fairly certain, for example, that major cities are more at risk than minor cities, political and commercial centers more at risk than other locales. Lack of security or ease of access to terrorist groups can also play a role. Nevertheless, these tentative conclusions raise questions that can only be answered thorough a quantitative analysis. Therefore, this research involves a thorough quantitative analysis in order to determine the spatio-temporal terrorism risk scores along the CPEC routes. Probabilistic modeling approach will be utilized and the resulting probability distribution will be mapped using ArcGIS representing the different regions along the CPEC corridor according to the respective risk scores.
