Message from the Global Terrorism Database Manager

Updated October 7, 2019: Thanks to short-term funding from the Department of Defense Combating Terrorism and Technical Support Office and the German Federal Foreign Office, START was able to complete the 2018 GTD collection and make improvements to the data collection and dissemination process. Although this allowed us to prevent a lapse in the GTD and publish the 2018 data, START continues to seek consistent funding for the GTD well beyond 2019. For example, the University of Maryland has partnered with CHC Global, a London-based consulting company focused on the terrorism insurance and reinsurance market, to serve as START’s exclusive commercial distribution partner for the GTD. This partnership is intended to help secure the long term stability of the GTD, ensure it remains freely available for personal and academic research use, and allow START researchers to focus on making improvements to the data and the data collection process.

Below is a statement from Dr. Erin Miller, Global Terrorism Database Manager:

For more than a decade, START has compiled and published the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) for use by scholars, analysts, journalists, security professionals, and policy makers.[1] It has been our privilege to work closely with these user communities to continually improve the data and inform stakeholders.

Since 2012, the majority of the costs of collecting the GTD have been funded by the U.S. State Department, for the past year almost exclusively. Our contract with the State Department ended in May 2018 and, although we received only positive feedback from the Bureau of Counterterrorism and our 2018 data collection was well underway, we recently learned that we were not awarded a follow-on contract for base data collection.

At the moment, the loss of the State Department funding means two things: First, we do not currently have funding to complete collection of 2018 data, nor are we able to publish data beyond 2017.

Second, although we sincerely value engaging with analysts, journalists, and policy makers to provide consultation, specialized analysis, and responses to requests for information (RFI), the GTD team does not currently have the resources to provide this service absent funding.

We have been proud to make the GTD a public good; the full dataset has been downloaded 89,000 times since 2007 and the average number of downloads per month has increased from 500 in 2014 to more than 2,000 in 2018 as we have worked to improve the data relentlessly. We’re proud to have answered thousands of RFIs. We’re hopeful that we can secure funding to allow us to continue serving as a public good, and as always, we urge users to contact us at gtd@start.umd.edu with feedback about the database.

Despite this concerning development, there is some reason to be optimistic. Consistent with the GTD team’s ethos of constant improvement, we are proud to say that the Department of Defense Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office will be funding START to make significant improvements to the GTD once again. In response to numerous requests for more frequent delivery of GTD data, START will greatly improve the efficiency of our GTD data collection and dissemination capabilities over the next year without compromising the accuracy of the data. This will ultimately make the GTD more timely and useful. Ideally, doing so will help us secure funding for base data collection from a variety of sponsors in such a way that better reflects the diversity of organizations that rely on the GTD.