Terrorist group abilities, ideology & motives (tAIM): Introducing a new global database on terro

"Terrorist group abilities, ideology & motives (tAIM): Introducing a new global database on terrorist groups and activities"

Roya Talibova

University of Michigan

Carly Wayne Washington University in Saint Louis

Abstract:

What are the factors that influence the patterns of terrorist violence? Terrorism is often a group-based phenomenon, perpetrated by individuals who claim membership in a larger organization. However, the unit of analysis for many existing terrorism datasets is at the event-level. In this paper, we address this issue, introducing a new cross-national dataset of characteristics of terrorist attacks and groups: the Terrorist Abilities, Ideologies & Motives (tAIM) Metadata. The tAIM Metadata contains a set of three comprehensive data sets of militant groups who have actively engaged in terrorism between 1970 to 2015, drawn

from the population of terrorist attacks in the Global Terrorism Database. Designed hier- archically, the tAIM Metadata includes: tAIM-event (66,675 obs and 142 variables), tAIM- group-year (4,405 obs and 69 variables), and tAIM-group (935 obs and 47 variables). tAIM

is unique in both the breadth of organizations covered — 935 unique militant groups in 117 countries over a 45-year time-span — and the number of original variables coded for each organization, including organizational-level features such as motive, ideology, strength, and birth country, among several others, and dynamically changing event-level attributes such as lethality to date, targeted country, attack frequency to date, and more. The complexity and scope of this dataset open multiple new avenues for the study of terrorism, providing a unique opportunity for scholars to carry out research on multiple

levels of analyses in order to uncover relationships between group- and event-level at- tributes and outcomes over time.