A tool for terrorism mavens

Here’s a quick recommendation for all you terrorism mavens out there. The Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST) has a fascinating and very useful website up and running, which you can access here.

According to its operators (a program headed by Professor Robert Pape), the site contains all known instances of suicide terrorism between 1981 and 2001, and will eventually be brought completely up to date. Three features of the site are especially interesting.  First, it lets you perform interactive searches along multiple dimensions (location of attacks, the target type, the weapon used, demographic and biographical characteristics of attackers, etc. For example, if you wanted to know how many suicide attacks were conducted by women in Kashmir between 1995 and 2000, you can enter those parameters and it will give you the results. Second, the site provides the external sources used to document each attack, so that you can check up on the coding of any specific incident. Third, each incident in linked to GPS data on location, so that you can explore the geographic patterns of contemporary suicide terrorism. On the latter point, by the way, the data shows that almost all these attacks are concentrated in Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Afpak, Iraq, and Israel/Palestine, a finding consistent with Pape’s well-known argument that suicide terrorism is primarily a response to perceived foreign occupations.

All in all, a very useful tool. But the skeptic in me has to ask the following question: will the existence of databases like this one tend to feed our fascination with conventional terrorism, a threat that is almost certainly exaggerated and overblown? (WMD terrorism is another matter, although we may be overstating that danger too). That’s not a criticism of the Chicago Project — which is doing excellent work — it’s just a warning to us all not to fixate on a phenomenon just because it’s something we can count.