Global Civil Society

International Roundtables

In collaborative with the American Academy in Berlin, The Collaborative organized its second International Roundtable on “Globalization, Terror and Democracy: How 9/11 Changed the Debate in America and Abroad.” Thirty-two distinguished academic practitioners whose work focuses on the theory and practice of democracy, joined leaders from government, business, intentional agencies and civil society organizations to review September 11’s impact on the globalization of democracy and to discuss next steps in strengthening democracy worldwide.

You may download a free copy of this new report by clicking this link (PDF 562KB).

The first of the Collaborative's Roundtables on "The Theory and Practice of Civic Globalism" was held in April, 2001, in Washington, D.C.

A report on this first meeting may be downloaded via this link (PDF 459KB).

Terrorism

Although the research literature on terrorism has expanded dramatically since the 1970s, the number of studies based on systematic empirical analysis is surprisingly limited. In fact, the research literature on terrorism is dominated by books with relatively little statistical analysis, many of them popular accounts of the lives of terrorists.

To fill this gap, the Collaborative's scholars have now initiated a research effort on "The Impact of Economic, Political and Social Variables on the Incidence of World Terrorism." The project will code and analyze a previously unavailable data set composed of 74,000 terrorist events recorded for the entire world from 1970 to 1997. This unique data base was originally collected by the Pinkerton Corporation's Global Intelligence Service and is believed to be the most comprehensive data set on terrorism that has ever been available to researchers. For example, the Pinkerton data base includes nearly 12 times as many incidents as the U.S. State Department data base for the same year.

By a special arrangement with Pinkerton Global Intelligence, the Collaborative has transferred the original hard copy of the Pinkerton terrorism data base to a secure location at the University of Maryland where the recoding and analysis of the data are underway. While coding the Pinkerton data, we will also be assembling a comprehensive set of annual nation-level time series data on a wide array of political, economic and social variables suggested by prior research to be important for understanding terrorism and the success of data collection effort will be aided substantially by the unique concentration of secondary data bases on political, economic and social indicators already available at the University of Maryland and its academic affiliates.

The Principal Investigator on this project is Gary LaFree of the University of Maryland.

Books

We also recommend the following books by Collaborative scholars:

Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World, by Benjamin Barber

Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks and Norms, by Sanjeev Khagram, James V. Riker, and Kathryn Sikkink (editors)