Using the DSAT

CPOST is proud to make the DSAT available to the public. We fully understand the impact of suicide attacks on civil wars and political violence, which is why we keep updating the database year after year.

To make the DSAT more accessible to a wider audience, CPOST developed a dashboard that helps users navigate the database without the need of any additional tool. The dashboard consists of a list of all suicide attacks included in the DSAT sorted by date. The list also includes information about the status of the attack and its location.

There are three ways a user can filter out information with the dashboard:

  1. Clicking on any attack on the list will provide specific information about it, such as the number of attackers and a detailed description of the casualties on the bottom right graph (civilian, political, or security) and a more precise location of the attack (see the map and hover over any dot to read additional details, including a description of the location, attack attribution, type of weapon used, etc.).
  2. Clicking on the map will filter the data on the list by city and will aggregate the information on the bottom right graph for that particular city over time.
  3. By filtering the data using the drop-down menus on top of the dashboard. There are options to filter by date, location, target type, and status of the attack.

Gender Analysis of Suicide Attackers

The DSAT also offers rich data about the perpetrators of suicide attacks. We collect data such as gender, which has proven its value when looking at the differences between groups and regions in the use of female suicide attackers.

The dashboard below has four different graphs comparing attackers' gender information. To make it easier to track each country, when a user clicks on any country, the four graphs will have that country highlighted. By clicking in the same place it will remove the highlight.

The top left graph shows the 15 countries with the highest number of female attackers in absolute numbers. However, a different comparison is shown in the bottom left graph, based on the gender of the attacker over the total number of attackers per country.

The graph on the right goes further in revealing the strategic differences between militant groups in their use of female suicide attackers by comparing attacks carried out by each gender (when having multiple attackers with different genders we use the mixed category) and they kind of target the go after.

Of note in this set of visualizations is the relatively common use of female suicide bombers against targets in Cameroon, Nigeria, and Chad, compared to their relative rarity in countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. Also, in Niger and Chad, female attackers are more likely to target civilians (80% and 87.5%, respectively) than male attackers, who target security forces more frequently in comparison (66.7% and 50%, respectively).