Building a Global Terrorism Database

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).