ABSTRACT
The Prosecution Project (tPP) is a long-term research platform tracking and analyzing how the United States prosecutes political violence. The students were encouraged to experiment with research methodologies they were unfamiliar with, and the studies contained in this collection utilize a variety of qualitative and quantitative approaches, all examining the same dataset. The inability to distinguish where apolitical violence crime ends and explicitly politically motivated violence begins is reflective of the lack of clear conceptual definitions in the fields of terrorism studies and criminology as well as the disagreement from State authorities as to what constitutes a crime of terrorism. Cases make their way into the project through three main ways: daily review of tPP’s curated Twitter feed, daily review of automated news alerts, and the manual scraping and re-coding of existing data sources. The majority of cases that come into the project are first identified through daily, source-specific news feeds.
