| Summary: | The Global Terrorism Database II (GTD2) project was undertaken to address the fact that there is little robust empirical analysis of terrorism. Due to this lack of available empirical data regarding terrorism, the researchers sought to code and verify a previously unavailable dataset composed of terrorist events recorded for the entire world from 1998 through 2004. The goal of the GTD2 was to create a comprehensive and sound data set on global terrorism that can be used to derive methodologically robust insights into the phenomenon of terrorism and how to counter it. Information in the GTD2 was drawn entirely from publicly available, open-source materials. The criteria for incident inclusion and the coding scheme used in GTD2 were developed by a Database Development Committee, which consisted of recognized experts in terrorism and data collection. In order to be considered a "terrorist incident" the event had to have been committed by nonstate actors, had to have been violent, and intentional. In addition the act must have met two of the following three criteria: (1) The act must have been aimed at attaining a political, economic, religious, or social goal. In terms of economic goals, the exclusive pursuit of profit did not satisfy this criterion. (2) There must have been evidence of an intention to coerce, intimidate, or convey some other message to a larger audience (or audiences) than the immediate victims. (3) The action must have been outside the context of legitimate warfare activities, i.e. the act must have been outside the parameters permitted by international humanitarian law (particularly the admonition against deliberately targeting civilians or noncombatants). To produce the GTD2 an administrative staff managed both paid and volunteer researchers who monitored a variety of open sources, identified potential cases for inclusion in the database and then coded these cases. Data in this collection contain 7,154 events. The main variable categories presented in these data include: Identification Numbers, ...
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