Terrorism Research Center in Fulbright College
The Terrorism Research Center in Fulbright College (TRC) was created in 2003 to facilitate research on terrorism, extremist violence, and the effectiveness of intervention strategies. The Center plays host to the American Terrorism Study (ATS), the nation’s longest running research project on terrorism in the United States. The project provides a comprehensive record of persons indicted in federal courts as a result of FBI “terrorism enterprise” investigations. Funded through the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Justice, the ATS is conducted in cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and under the sponsorship of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
The TRC currently manages several other federally funded projects that build off the ATS foundation. These include National Institute of Justice and DoD funded projects that are:
- examining the geospatial and temporal patterns of environmental and international terrorists in the United States
- examining prosecutorial and defense strategies in terrorism trials
- compiling geospatial and temporal data on all ATS cases from 1980-2004 to make a comprehensive ATS database available for scholars to access via an Oracle framework
- examining “building use” by terrorist groups in America to determine if comparable patterns might apply in countries with high rates of terroristic violence such as Iraq. The TRC partners with UA’s Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies for much of this work.
Mr. Chris Shields, Research Associate and ATS Projects Manager
Mr. Paxton Roberts, Research Associate and Geospatial Projects Manager