Introducing a new dataset on Designated Terrorist Organizations (DTO)
| Author | Yasutaka Tominaga,Chia-yi Lee,Mengting Lyu |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433211065642 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Special Data Features |
Special Data Features
Introducing a new dataset on Designated
Terrorist Organizations (DTO)
Yasutaka Tominaga
Faculty of Economics, Hosei University
Chia-yi Lee
Department of Diplomacy, National Chengchi University
Mengting Lyu
S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University
Abstract
This article introduces a new dataset, Designated Terrorist Organizations (DTO), which details every terrorist
organization designated or sanctioned by two IGOs and 148 state governments, as well as the timing of each designa-
tion. The DTO includes 281 terrorist groups that have been officially designated by at least one IGO or state
government as well as 223 other active terrorist groups that have never been designated. The DTO has a dyadic
structure that offers information on both the designating country and the designated group, such as the base location
and past activities. We present some trends and patterns of terrorist designation over time and across countries and
apply the DTO to analyze the impact of terrorist designation on groups’ attacks. Our preliminary findings show that
terrorist designation is negatively associated with terrorist attacks, although the effect only appears in an earlier period.
Keywords
terrorism, terrorist designation, terrorist organizations
Introduction
Many governments and intergovernmental organiza-
tions (IGOs), including the United Nations (UN) and
the European Union (EU), have their own official lists
of proscribed or designated terrorist groups or individ-
uals. Why do governments and IGOs maintain such
lists? Is terrorist designation an effective counterterror-
ism policy tool? These questions are of great importance
to terrorism researchers and counterterrorism policy-
makers, but unfortunately they cannot be answered
systematically without a comprehensive dataset on the
official lists of terrorists worldwide. As an important
step, the Designated Terrorist Organizations (DTO)
dataset details every country’s and IGO’s designated
terrorist organizations, whichwebelievewillbeakey
source for scholars who research terrorism, counterter-
rorism, or more broadly IR or conflicts.
The DTO offers at least two advantages. It is the first
comprehensive database that documents all official lists
of terrorist groups in the contemporary world, including
government and IGO lists. While there are important
large-N studies on terrorist designation that rely on the
US Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) list (Chou,
2015; Phillips, 2019) or on a handful of countries’ lists
(Beck & Miner, 2013), studying only the US lists or its
allies’ lists may miss the full picture for two reasons. One
is that the global counterterrorism narratives are not
created and controlled only by the United States and its
Western allies; other non-Western countries, including
Russia and China, also have their rhetorics and under-
standing of counterterrorism, which are often divergent
Corresponding author:
y-tominaga@hosei.ac.jp
Journal of Peace Research
2022, Vol. 59(5) 756–766
ªThe Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433211065642
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