ABSTRACT
As international interest in terrorism has grown-and especially since the events of 9/11-researchers and policymakers have increasingly sought to understand terrorism by looking at the social, economic, and political characteristics of countries. This chapter examines connections between a newly available measure of terrorist attacks and one such characteristic: whether a country was undergoing a period of state failure. For this purpose we rely on the most common definition of state failure as a country that is “utterly incapable of sustaining itself as a member of the international community”. Authors began the Global Terrorism Database by computerizing nearly 70,000 domestic and international terrorism events originally collected by the Pinkerton Global Intelligence Service.
