RAND-St Andrews database

The RAND-St Andrews database, also known as the RAND-St Andrews Chronology of Terrorism was a database of international terrorist incidents which was developed by Bruce Hoffman whilst he was at the University of St. Andrews, and was later maintained by students at the university.

The database had its origins in the RAND Terrorism Chronology Database first developed by Brian Jenkins at RAND in the 1970s, and started on 3” x 5” cards. When Jenkins left the RAND Corporation to become a managing partner at Kroll Associates, the database was taken over by his successor Bruce Hoffman.

The database was essentially brought with Hoffman when he left RAND in 1993 to set up the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews. At St. Andrews Hoffman, his wife Donna and doctoral candidate David Claridge continued to update the database with the assistance of various graduate students.

Bruce Hoffman and his wife left St. Andrews in December 1997 taking data from the chronology back to RAND. According to Alex Schmid the St Andrews database was thereafter run under the name 'CSTPV Database project' mainly by students.

It was discontinued in the original form due to the fact that MIPT continued the RAND database with more manpower than available at St. Andrews while at the same time the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) also started a large database. CSTPV donated its events and profiling databases to START and now focuses its data gathering efforts on the collection and analysis of primary full-text and audio-visual documents from terrorist groups.

Criticism

In a 2005 article, British academics Jonny Burnett and Dave Whyte criticise the methodology employed in the compilation of the database, which was and is the basis of much of the mainstream terrorism research:

Since the RAND-St Andrews chronology only records those incidents that are ‘international’, the database is orientated towards the recording of attacks on foreign visitors to, and military occupiers of, relatively poor countries. By definition those victims are normally business representatives and military personnel from economically strong, normally Western, nations. The second observation, which reinforces this latter point, is that the Chronology explicitly excludes acts of state terror committed by any government against its own citizens, and acts of violence occurring in war or in war-like situations. Incidents involving Western armies of occupation and businesses are included in the Chronology only where they are victims rather than the perpetrators of violence. Third, some of the methodological inconsistencies in the use of data in the Chronology database are reminiscent of the counter-insurgency position. It is possible to find non-violent activities and protests against state violence recorded in the database as ‘terrorism.’