About CPOST

The Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, directed by Robert A. Pape of the University of Chicago, supports broad-based, original research on terrorism and international security. The Chicago Project maintains a complete worldwide knowledge base of suicide attacks and attackers, martyr videos, terrorist group profiles, and multidisciplinary analyses confronting core international security challenges. Prior funding for these efforts was provided by the University of Chicago Division of the Social Sciences, the United States Department of Defense (the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the Office of Naval Research), Argonne National Laboratory, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The first complete version of this database was published in the American Political Science Review in August 2003 and is updated on the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism searchable database. The CPOST database is based on English and native language sources (eg. Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Tamil, and Urdu).

The Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism is currently made possible through the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Research

The Chicago Project's main activities focus on core international security challenges: such as the causes and solutions to terrorism, the dynamics of martyrdom, the consequences of nuclear proliferation, and the analytic premises of grand strategy. To advance these objectives, the Chicago Project comprises a variety of book-length, article-length monographs, and Ph.D. dissertation research by faculty and graduate students at the University of Chicago and other institutions of higher learning.

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Search the Suicide Attack Database

The Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism maintains a searchable database on all suicide attacks from 1981 to 2008 and additional years will be added. The database includes information about the location of attacks, the target type, the weapon used, and systematic information on the demographic and general biographical characteristics of suicide attackers. The database expands the breadth of the data available in English using native language sources (e.g., Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Tamil) that are likely to have the most extensive relevant information.