The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2016 17 O ur 24/7, ratings- driven media tend to have a bias toward novelty and sensation, often rel- egating factual and objective informa- tion to an after- thought. Coverage of terrorism, such a dominant feature of the international landscape in the recent period, is certainly no exception—which is why the Univer- sity of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database is noteworthy. A comprehensive open-source database with information on ter- rorism events from 1970 through 2014, GTD’s data is collected and assembled through a rigorous and time-consuming process that ensures its credibility and is, thus, a tremendous resource for research- ers, analysts and scholars. GTD gathers information from a wide range of media sources. Because there is no universally accepted definition of terrorism, GTD includes a broad range of events, with the aim of compiling a data set that is helpful to as many interested users as possible. But before any information is added to the database, its accuracy and the credibility of its source or sources are vetted by an advisory panel made up of professors with special expertise from top universi- ties and terrorist experts from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Ter- rorism. This process takes more than six months. As a result, data for 2015 will not be added until August 2016. When new documentation on an event is available, entries are modi- fied accordingly, through the same process. The GTD houses organized data on more than 140,000 domestic and international terrorist inci- dents. For each case, the date of the incident, location, weapon(s) used, nature of the target and, when identifiable, the individual or group responsible is given. The website offers user-friendly search tools and step-by-step help. With free access and download to more than 50MB of expertly vetted information, the GTD is an important contribution to a better understanding of the grim reality of terrorism and its impact on foreign affairs. —Dastan Sadykov, Editorial Intern SITE OF THE MONTH: Global Terrorism Database (www.start.umd.edu/gtd) AFSA Dissent Awards afsa.org/awards American Foreign Service Association/Scholarship afsa.org/scholar Clements Worldwide clements.com Embassy Risk Management embassyrisk.com The Hirshorn Company hirshorn.com/USFS McGrath Real Estate Services McGrathRealEstate.com Promax promaxrealtors.com Stanford Online High School ohs.stanford.edu WJD Management wjdpm.com Washington Retirement Planning Specialists dcrps.com