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Building a Global Terrorism Database

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Building a Global Terrorism Database The author(s) shown below used Federal funds provided by the U.S. Department of Justice and prepared the following final report: Document Title: Building a Global Terrorism Database Author(s): Gary LaFree ; Laura Dugan ; Heather V. Fogg ; Jeffrey Scott Document No.: 214260 Date Received: May 2006 Award Number: 2002-DT-CX-0001 This report has not been published by the U.S. Department of Justice. To provide better customer service, NCJRS has made this Federally- funded grant final report available electronically in addition to traditional paper copies. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. BUILDING A GLOBAL TERRORISM DATABASE Dr. Gary LaFree Dr. Laura Dugan Heather V. Fogg Jeffrey Scott University of Maryland April 27, 2006 This project was supported by Grant No. 2002-DT-CX-0001 awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. TABLE OF CONTENTS Excutive Summary.................................................................................................. 1 Building a Global Terrorism Database ................................................................... 4 The Original PGIS Database.......................................................................... 6 Methods................................................................................................................... 8 Overview of the Data Collection Plan ......................................................... 10 Designing the Database and Web-Based Data Entry Interface ................... 11 Data Entry .................................................................................................... 14 Evaluating the PGIS Data ..................................................................................... 19 Database Strengths....................................................................................... 20 Weaknesses of Open Source Terrorism Databases...................................... 24 Comparisons Across Databases ............................................................................ 26 Terrorism Databases .................................................................................... 27 Prior Research Comparing Terrorism Databases......................................... 34 The PGIS Database............................................................................................... 36 Incidents by Year ......................................................................................... 37 Terrorist Groups........................................................................................... 38 Type of Attack ............................................................................................. 38 Country ........................................................................................................ 39 Incident Date................................................................................................ 40 Success......................................................................................................... 40 Region.......................................................................................................... 41 Target Type.................................................................................................. 43 Number of Perpetrators................................................................................ 44 Weapons Used ............................................................................................. 44 Number of Fatalities .................................................................................... 46 Number of U.S. Fatalties ............................................................................. 46 Number of Wounded.................................................................................... 47 Number of U.S. Wounded ........................................................................... 48 Kidnappings ................................................................................................. 50 Nationality.................................................................................................... 50 Description of PGIS Database .............................................................................. 50 Future Projects and Directions.............................................................................. 75 References............................................................................................................. 84 Appendix A: Incident Type Definitions .............................................................. 91 Appendix B: Global Terrorism Project Data Entry Guide................................... 94 General Guidelines and Suggestions ........................................................... 94 Interface Pages............................................................................................. 95 Appendix C: General Data Entry Test Case Results ......................................... 113 Appendix D: Sources Used to Create the Database Country List ..................... 123 Appendix E: Comparing RAND, ITERATE, and PGIS Countries ................... 124 Appendix F: Distribution of Incidents by Country............................................. 134 Appendix G: Nationality of the Target .............................................................. 141 Appendix H: A Study of Aerial Hijackings........................................................ 148 1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Although the research literature on terrorism has expanded dramatically since the 1970s, the number of studies based on systematic empirical analysis is surprisingly limited. One of the main reasons for this lack of cutting-edge empirical analysis on terrorism is the low quality of available statistical data. To address this lack of empirical data, the goal of the current project was to code and verify a previously unavailable data set composed of 67,165 terrorist events recorded for the entire world from 1970 to 1997. This unique database was originally collected by the PGIS Corporation’s Global Intelligence Service (PGIS). The PGIS database was designed to document every known terrorist event across countries and time and allows us to examine the total number of different types of terrorist events by specific date and geographical region. To the best of our knowledge this is the most comprehensive open source data set on terrorism that has ever been available to researchers. PGIS trained their employees to identify and code terrorism incidents from a variety of sources, including wire services (especially Reuters and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service), U.S. State Department reports, other U.S. and foreign government reports, U.S. and foreign newspapers, information provided by PGIS offices around the world, occasional inputs from such special interests as organized political opposition groups, and data furnished by PGIS clients and other individuals in both official and private capacities. 2 By a special arrangement with PGIS, the Principal Investigator arranged to move the original hard copies of the PGIS terrorism database to a secure location at the University of Maryland. In order to increase the efficiency of the data entry process, a web-based data entry interface was designed and made compatible with the database platform. Once the interface was completed, project staff tested its operation with two separate waves of randomly sampled incidents from the original PGIS data cards. Trained undergraduate research assistants then entered cases into the data entry interface. The initial data entry period lasted six months. During the latter part of this time period, we also began verifying entered data for accurate entry against the hard copy cards. The verification procedure has resulted in nearly 50 percent of the database verified for accurate entry. Although the current report does not address any specific research question, we discuss at length both the strengths and weaknesses of the completed database. Strengths include its broad definition of terrorism and its longitudinal structure. Weaknesses of the database include potential media bias and misinformation, lack of information beyond incident specific details alone, and missing data from lost cards (data for the year 1993 were lost by PGIS in an office move). Our data collection and analysis strategy has been two pronged. First, we sought to reliably enter the original PGIS data. This was the primary objective for the current grant and has now been completed. Not only have we employed a number of data entry quality control strategies throughout the data entry phase, including extensive training, documentation, tools built into the data entry interface, and pre-testing of the database 3 both with project staff and student data enterers, but we have also verified for accuracy about half of the total incidents entered. Second, we plan to continue to assess the validity of the PGIS data by comparing it to other sources, by internally checking records, and by continuously examining the database. This is essentially an ongoing project that will be greatly furthered by new projects we are planning with RAND and the Monterey Institute. Comparing PGIS data directly to the two other major
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