The Terrorism in Armed Conflict (TAC) project was developed to enable the study of terrorism within intrastate armed conflicts by uniting the most comprehensive available data sources from both research communities. TAC is led by Page Fortna (Columbia University) with Nick Lotito (Yale University) and Mike Rubin (University of Connecticut).
TAC brings together information from the most commonly used data set in the study of civil war, the Uppsala Conflict Data Project (UCDP) Dyadic Dataset and the most comprehensive event data set on terrorism, START’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD). The data set is designed to capture as much information as possible, and then to provide flexibility to the researcher to handle the uncertainty regarding assigning group responsibility to incidents.
Currently, TAC provides annual counts of the use of terrorism by 409 armed opposition groups in 166 intrastate conflicts in 96 countries from 1970-2013.
The simplest way to use TAC is to download a ready-to-use data set in the format of your choice. These data files use the standard set of count variables and implement a definition of terrorism as "deliberately indiscriminate" violence (see the TAC Codebook for more details).
- Terrorism count data by group-year
- Standard TAC count data by dyad-year
To create your own count data using TAC, see the source code or interactive apps linked below. You can also access the list of TAC coding decisions in R format or plain-text or the full list of GTD incidents linked to UCDP groups in R format or plain-text.
This repository also includes the source data and code to generate the Terrorism in Armed Conflict data set.
The code is implemented in both Stata and R (see the Stata and R folders, respectively).
You can also interact with TAC data through our apps.
This app allows researchers to generate terrorism count data using custom criteria (e.g., attack or target type). You can access the app in your browser at https://nicklotito.shinyapps.io/tacdata/.
Alternatively, you can run the app on your own computer using R. To access:
- Install R (free and open-source software) for Windows or Mac OSX
- Run RGui and install the required R packages by typing
install.packages(c("shiny","shinyjs","dplyr"))at the R command line - Launch the TAC app by typing
shiny::runGitHub('DataApp', 'TACDataProject')
You can also access the source code for this app on GitHub.
This app allows users to visualize the trend in terrorism incidents by rebel group. Access the app online at: https://nicklotito.shinyapps.io/tacgroup/
Or run the app from R (follow steps 1 and 2 above) with the command shiny::runGitHub('GroupApp', 'TACDataProject').
You can also access the source code for this app on GitHub.