Global Terrorism Database

Data

The GTD describe itself as the "most comprehensive unclassified data base on terrorist events in the world" and includes over 140,000 terrorist attacks. The entire database (about 50 MB) is available for download via the website. The manner of encoding of the data is described in a codebook, also available as PDF download from the website.

History

In 2001, the University of Maryland, College Park obtained a large database of terrorist attacks from 1970 to 1997 collated by Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services (data from 1993 was missing because it got lost in an office move by Pinkerton, however, some summary data from 1993 is still available). With funding from the National Institute of Justice, the University of Maryland finished digitizing the data in December 2005. In April 2006, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), working with the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), received additional funding from the Human Factors Division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to extend the GTD beyond 1997. The data generated for 1997 to 2007 was then harmonized with the Pinkerton data from 1970 to 1997 to create a unified database of terrorist events from 1970 to 2007 (excluding 1993). New years were periodically added, and as of August 2014, the data goes up to 2014.

The GTD was formally introduced in a paper in Terrorism and Political Violence by Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan of START, published in 2007. An update on the GTD by LaFree was published by Perspectives on Terrorism in 2010. Another update was published in Evidence-based Counterterrorism Policy in 2012.

Use in other databases and indices

Data from the Global Terrorism Database is used to generate the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) published by the Institute for Economics and Peace.

Academic reception

A number of academic papers studying various aspects of terrorism, including trends in the amount and types of terrorism, draws on data from the GTD for its empirical analysis.

In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, author Steven Pinker used data from the Global Terrorism Database for his analysis of trends in terrorism, calling it "the major publicly available dataset on terrorist attacks."

In 2014 Pape et al. observed that, “according to the GTD data today, there were over 70 percent more suicide attacks in 2013 (619) than the previous peak in 2007 (359) during the Iraq war." Meanwhile, their Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST) claims a 19 percent decrease for the same period:

Pape et al. noted that this difference can be explained by a change in methodology between 2007 and 2013. As noted above, the GTD data were collected by four different organizations:

Pape et al. quote GTD officials as claiming that their “researchers, past and present, have ensured that the entire database uses the same standards for inclusion and is as comprehensive as possible.” Pape et al. disagree while noting that their CPOST methodology has been consistent since their first recorded incident in 1982. They conclude, “American policy makers and the public deserve the best data available on terrorism, one of the most important national security issues of our time.”

Reception in news media and blogs

The Global Terrorism Database has been cited in The Guardian, using a database of terrorism we look at how the frequency and type of attack has changed the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Policy.