What Is Domestic Terrorism? A Method for Classifying Events From the Global Terrorism Database

Domestic terrorism accounts for a vast majority of all attacks, yet it is far less studied than its transnational counterpart. As a result, the literature on domestic terrorism remains theoretically and empirically underdeveloped. One of the reasons for this is the dearth of comprehensive crossnational domestic terrorism datasets. This article seeks to address the problem by proposing a method for refining original Global Terrorism Database (GTD) data into a constructively valid, crossnational domestic terrorism dataset. The analysis begins with the definition of terrorism and further develops it by conceptually distinguishing its domestic and transnational forms. Because the GTD includes nonterrorist events and conflates transnational and domestic incidents, its raw form is unsuited for domestic research. Therefore, the article examines common definitional attributes from terrorism and domestic terrorism literature. It concludes by specifying steps for assembling a dataset and examining descriptive statistics of the resulting population.