Counterterrorism
Description
Al Shabab and Somalia
Some terrorist groups, such as the Islamic State, target more than one state. In such cases, you will want to select one or more states that serve as the primary target of the group.
Once you have downloaded the latest version of the GTD and selected a terrorist group and target country, use Excel’s Pivot Table functionality to create four tables. These tables should be identical in format to the four tables introduced in the final section of this lesson:
A table summarizing the number of attacks, the number of victims, and the number of suicide attacks that the group has committed for each year
A table summarizing the types of targets that the group has attacked; this table should include information about the number of attacks on each target, and the percentage of all of the group’s attacks on each target type
A table summarizing the attack types used by the group; this table should list the number of attacks perpetrated by the group for each attack type, as well as the percentage of attacks perpetrated by the group for each attack type
A table summarizing all terrorist attacks in the target country by group, including unknown attacks
When you have finished creating your Pivot Tables, copy and paste them into a Word document. For each table, include a short paragraph summarizing what conclusions you can draw. For example, what types of targets does the group attack most frequently? How many attacks in the country are not attributed to any particular group?
Be sure to upload to Canvas BOTH your paper as well as the Excel spreadsheet that shows how you generated your pivot tables and plots.
Some tips in preparing this assignment:
Write a short introductory paragraph identifying the name of the group, the government or governments they oppose, and their strategic objectives
Figures and tables are meant to summarize complex data in a way that is easy for the reader to understand. When preparing your graphs, keep your reader in mind. In general, it is a good idea to assume that your reader is a reasonably intelligent person who has seen graphs before, but is not familiar with the group or conflict you are analyzing. This means you need to think about what information needs to be included in the graph so that this type of reader can easily understand any patterns that it presents. You also need to consider what information should not be included, as it does not add much value to the graph or might be distracting or confusing. Your figures and tables will be not only on if they present the data correctly (in other words, that you have used Excel correctly), but also on how well and effectively they present the data.
Ensure each table is numbered and has a usefully descriptive title
Ensure that labels are sufficiently large that a reader can read them, that they describe the data, and do not include any extraneous information
If your data has many categories that have zero attacks, consider consolidating these into a single category by editing your pivot table
Do not include both tables and plots depicting the same data
Carefully check spelling, capitalization, and wording of titles, axes labels, and data labels; ensure that a non-expert reader could figure out what is going on in your plot by looking at it quickly
Ensure no years are missing
