Terrorism

This article is concerned with terrorism and it presents comprehensive data on global terrorist attacks for rigorous policy analysis. It begins by summarizing efforts to measure terrorism and provides an overview of the distribution of global terrorist violence over time and space using the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) data. This article then turns to terrorist activity in the United States, describing perpetrators, targets, and weapons. It describes two efforts that assess the effectiveness of different policy interventions using the GTD data and attempts to understand government action in preventing terrorist activity. This article concludes with a discussion of need of a comprehensive data set that includes the full range of policy responses to terrorism that will enable us to analyze more thoroughly and more rigorously the policy responses to terrorism.