What Is Domestic Terrorism? A Method for Classifying Events From the Global Terrorism Database

Bibliographic Data

ID4086523
AuthorsRichard E Berkebile (Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, USA, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume29
Issue1
Pages1-26
Publication date2017-01-02
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTerrorism and Political Violence (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0954-6553 • E-ISSN: 1556-1836
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09546553.2014.985378
OpenAlexW2077425247
LanguageEN
Citations received16

Domestic terrorism accounts for a vast majority of all attacks, yet it is far less studied than its transnational counterpart. As a result, the literature on domestic terrorism remains theoretically and empirically underdeveloped. One of the reasons for this is the dearth of comprehensive crossnational domestic terrorism datasets. This article seeks to address the problem by proposing a method for refining original Global Terrorism Database (GTD) data into a constructively valid, crossnational domestic terrorism dataset. The analysis begins with the definition of terrorism and further develops it by conceptually distinguishing its domestic and transnational forms. Because the GTD includes nonterrorist events and conflates transnational and domestic incidents, its raw form is unsuited for domestic research. Therefore, the article examines common definitional attributes from terrorism and domestic terrorism literature. It concludes by specifying steps for assembling a dataset and examining descriptive statistics of the resulting population

Database · Domestic terrorism · Political economy · Political science · Population · Raw data · Sociology · Terrorism · Computer Science · Law · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence