CENTER OF EXCELLENCE
START Research Spotlight
Since the establishment of this Center of Excellence in 2005, START has made significant contributions to the Nation's understanding of the causes and human consequences of terrorism in the United States and around the world. A few key research highlights are listed below. More information is available at: www.start.umd.edu/start/data_collections/.
Global Terrorism Database (GTD): The GTD is an open-source database that catalogues more than 87,000 terrorist events that have taken place around the world since 1970. For each event, the GTD notes the date, target, and location; the type of attack, number of casualties, and weapons used; the group claiming responsibility; and more than 100 more variables.
Big Allied and Dangerous (BAAD): The BAAD Lethality Database was formed in order to help answer the question "Why are some terrorist organizations much more lethal than others?" BAAD Lethality seeks to create a comprehensive database of terrorist organizations, much like the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) does with terrorist incidents. The lethality database contains information on organizational level variables such as ideology, location, size, structure, and funding as well as network data on variables such as allies, rivals, targets, and state sponsors. The data were retrieved from MIPT's Terrorism Knowledge Base, Correlates of War (COW), Polity, and Polity2.
Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART): The CART is a kit of interventions along with processes for using the interventions to enhance community resilience through assessment, group processes, planning, and action. The CART process encourages public engagement in problem solving and the development and use of local assets to address community needs and is designed to strengthen and empower communities. In applications to date, CART has identified areas of concern in communities, increased understanding of the essentials of community resilience, enhanced communication and cooperation, and facilitated the development of action plans to improve community resilience.
Minorities at Risk for Organizational Behavior (MAROB): MAROB is an open-source dataset covering political organizations representing the interests of ethnic groups whose political status and behavior is tracked by the Minorities at Risk project. MAROB gathers information on more than 163 variables for both violent and non-violent organizations, allowing for comparisons between the two. Currently, the dataset covers 112 organizations representing 22 ethnic groups in 12 countries of the Middle East and North Africa and operating between 1980 and 2004. Future MAROB data collection will extend to other regions, including Europe, South Asia and Latin America. An update of the Middle East and North Africa data through 2007 is also underway.
Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI): The Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina released a Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI) for the United States. SoVI provides comparative data at the county level on social vulnerability to hazards and extreme events, based on the synthesis of 42 socioeconomic, demographic, and built-environment variables. The county-level data points have been geocoded, allowing researchers to easily compare vulnerability within and across states.
The Terrorist Organization Profiles (TOPs): This data collection provides background information on more than 850 organizations known to engage in terrorist activity during the last four decades. Included for each organization is information on bases of operations, organizational strength, ideology, and goals.
Terrorism & Preparedness Data Resource Center (TPDRC):TPDRC is housed at the University of Michigan's Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). TPDRC takes data from a variety of sources, archives the data, and distributes it. The center also organizes and streamlines access to extant research and administrative data from across the world pertaining to the study of terrorism and the response to terrorism. In this way, the data can be mined for descriptive and scientific analysis by academics and researchers.