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Idea

¹ú²úÊÓƵ’s International Security program (ISP) created a database about terrorism in the United States since 9/11 to track the actions of jihadist terrorists and to better understand who they are, and the reality of threats in order to promote better policy and judicious resource allocation.

Incubation

ISP established the website in 2010 to better understand who is charged with acts of jihadist terrorism in the United States. The dataset was subsequently expanded to include any act of lethal political violence.

Impact

In 2017, ¹ú²úÊÓƵ’s research on the terrorist threat played a central role in the public and legal backlash against the Trump administration’s travel ban. Our data showed that the ban would not have prevented any of the deadly attacks in the United States since 9/11 because it singled out countries of origin that had not been the home countries of any domestic terrorists in the prior 16 years. ¹ú²úÊÓƵ’s research also showed that the Trump administration’s claims that a southern border wall would stop terrorists were nonsense. ¹ú²úÊÓƵ’s commitment to tracking deadly terrorist acts, regardless of motivation, provided an essential counterpoint to the tendency to focus only on jihadist attacks. In November 2017, Senator Dick Durbin introduced the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2017 to address the terrorist threat from domestic, non-jihadist terrorists. In doing so, Senator Durbin cited ¹ú²úÊÓƵ’s data on deadly far-right attacks. The Obama administration appointed a senior Department of Justice official to focus on non-jihadist domestic terrorists and cited ¹ú²úÊÓƵ’s research when that official was appointed.