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.