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Government Actions in Terror Environments (GATE): A Methodology that Reveals how Governments Behave toward Terrorists and their Constituencies

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Handbook of Computational Approaches to Counterterrorism

Abstract

With the persistent alarm being raised about terrorist violence by the media and government officials it is unsurprising that scholarship in this area has grown well beyond its traditional disciplinary boundaries (i.e., political science and international relations). As scholars from disciplines such as criminology [27, 30], computer science [11, 12, 35], economics [25], and others get more involved, more data sources have become available [1, 19, 28, 50] and more sophisticated analytical methods have been applied to terrorism research [14, 17, 30]. Yet, research on the effectiveness of counterterrorism measures has only incrementally improved in recent years [33].

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Their sample includes American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, and Conflict Management and Peace Science.

  2. 2.

    Network analysis provides another way to incorporate relational data into the field. In this case, the relationships are between and among terrorist groups, rather than between the groups and their targets. There have been some recent advances with network analysis, such as Asal and Rethemeyer’s Big, Allied, and Dangerous database [1] and Horowitz and Potter’s [24] study on the effects of network centrality on the diffusion of terrorist tactics.

  3. 3.

    In our case, we used the CAMEO coding scheme.

  4. 4.

    Schrodt estimates that TABARI codes 33 million times faster than the average human coder (2006).

  5. 5.

    There were 9,530 actions detected for these countries from 1988 through 2004. As the authors publish studies using the data, they will become available to other researchers. The monthly version of GATE-Israel is available on the American Sociological Review’s website in an on-line appendix associated with their article [15].

  6. 6.

    A much more elaborate analysis is found in Dugan and Chenoweth [15]. Also see that article for details about how the time-series dataset was constructed. Further, we also include in this analysis all terror attacks with an unknown perpetrator.

  7. 7.

    As with Israel, we also include terror attacks by unknown perpetrators.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Laura Dugan

  2. University of Denver, Denver, CO, 80208, USA

    Erica Chenoweth

Authors
  1. Laura Dugan
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  2. Erica Chenoweth
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Laura Dugan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Computer Science Department, University of Maryland, AV Williams Building, College Park, 20854, Maryland, USA

    V.S. Subrahmanian

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Dugan, L., Chenoweth, E. (2013). Government Actions in Terror Environments (GATE): A Methodology that Reveals how Governments Behave toward Terrorists and their Constituencies. In: Subrahmanian, V. (eds) Handbook of Computational Approaches to Counterterrorism. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5311-6_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5311-6_21

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