Security Studies

There has been a dramatic increase in research on terrorism and counterterrorism since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Given its prominence, many scholars have assessed the advancement of the field in terms of publication output and research questions. However, there has also been a significant growth in data collection efforts. Datasets on terrorism and counterterrorism have been developed and revised across a number of levels: the event level, organizational level, and individual level. At the event level, datasets offer cross-national, regional, and subnational coverage of individual terrorist events and their characteristics, such as lethality, targets, tactics, and perpetrators. Organizational-level datasets unveil important characteristics of terrorist organizations—including ideology, capabilities, duration, social service provision, and networks—over time and space. Individual-level datasets contain information on global jihad, online activity, terrorist leaders, and terrorism in the United States. While more limited on coverage, data on counterterrorism focus on hard-power counterterrorism, targeted counterterrorism (e.g., drone strikes and leadership decapitation), and soft-power counterterrorism, which encompasses strategies aimed at raising the perceived benefits of abstaining from terrorism. Many datasets and integration techniques have also been developed to study the practice of terrorism in various contexts, such as civil war and ethnic conflict. Data integration expands and deepens our understanding of the causes, dynamics, and consequences of terrorism in various contexts and sheds light on the relationship between terrorism and other violent and nonviolent tactics. The growth of data collection efforts is beneficial for researchers in the field of terrorism and beyond as well as for policy makers and practitioners.

UN peacekeeping serves as the foremost international tool for conflict intervention and peace management. Since the Cold War, these efforts have almost exclusively targeted conflicts within, rather than between, states. Where traditional peacekeeping missions sought to separate combatants and monitor peace processes across state borders, modern peacekeeping in civil wars involves a range of tasks from intervening directly in active conflicts to rebuilding political institutions and societies after the fighting ends. To accommodate this substantial change, peacekeeping operations have grown in number, size, and scope of mandate. The increasing presence and changing nature of peacekeeping has sparked great interest in understanding when and how peacekeeping is used and how effective it is in delivering and sustaining peace. Significant advances in peacekeeping data collection have allowed for a more rigorous investigation of the phenomenon, including differentiation in the objectives, tasks, and structure of a mission as well as disaggregation of the activities and impact of peacekeepers’ presence across time and space. Researchers are particularly interested in understanding the adaption of peacekeeping to the unique challenges of the civil war setting, such as intervention in active conflicts, the greater involvement and victimization of civilians, the reintegration of rebel fighters into society, and the establishment of durable political, economic, and social institutions after the fighting ends. Additional inquiries consider why the UN deploys peacekeeping to some wars and not others, how and why operations differ from one another, and how the presence of and variation across missions impacts conflict countries before and after the fighting has stopped.