About the Dataset

Over the last 15 years, scholarship on terrorism and political violence has skyrocketed. Many studies, and numerous large-n analyses in particular, now rely on data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism’s (START) Global Terrorism Database (GTD). Far more extensive than competing datasets that document individual attacks, GTD has facilitated the analysis of terrorism globally, by country, by organization, by campaign, and in various other important ways. One major flaw, however, prevents scholars from utilizing GTD to run reliable time-series analyses across the entirety of the Database’s annual range (1970-2014), and has likely contributed to the formation of theories and claims on faulty empirical ground. This problem stems from the loss of data for the year 1993. The data loss apparently occurred before the original data collection team at Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services (PGIS) transferred its hard copies to the START headquarters at the University of Maryland at College Park. In order to facilitate the analysis of lengthier and uninterrupted time-series data and in a broad effort to shed light on the events of the largely dark year of 1993, we have set out to identify the universe of attacks that occurred in 1993. Currently, we have amassed 4,206 attack events. Though our data collection enterprise remains ongoing, we view that our dataset as it stands is essential to facilitating reliable time-series analyses at the event and organizational levels, as well as preventing the formation of faulty theories supported by incomplete empirical analyses.