The Old Terrorism: A Dataset, 1860—1969

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, research on terrorism has grown exponentially. Data limitations, however, have made temporal generalization difficult. Most terrorism datasets extend back only to the 1970s, which inhibits the ability to quantitatively examine earlier waves of terrorism. To address this limitation, this article presents a dataset of over 250 terrorist organizations formed between 1860 and 1969. These data, which have global coverage, include country-year information on group formation, allowing scholars to examine the relationship between various country-year factors and the emergence of terrorist organizations. To illustrate their usefulness, these data are used to examine the relationship between democracy and terrorist group formation. Following several recent studies, the empirical analysis reveals a curvilinear or inverted u-shaped relationship between terrorism and democracy.

自“9·11”恐怖袭击事件以来，恐怖主义研究呈指数级增长态势。然而，数据局限性使得时间维度上的泛化研究难以推进。多数现有恐怖主义数据集仅能追溯至20世纪70年代，这制约了学界对更早几波恐怖主义浪潮开展定量分析的能力。为解决这一研究局限，本文构建了一份涵盖1860年至1969年间成立的250余家恐怖组织的数据集。该数据集具备全球覆盖范围，包含了恐怖组织成立的国家-年份维度信息，可支持学者探究各类国家-年份维度因素与恐怖组织诞生之间的关联。为验证该数据集的应用价值，本文利用其分析了民主制度与恐怖组织成立之间的关联。借鉴近期多项研究的分析框架，本次实证分析结果显示，恐怖主义与民主程度之间存在曲线型（倒U型）关联。