About Article

There is a general tendency among analysts to treat the activity of the United Nations Security Council as a barometer for measuring the evolution of global security issues. However, despite the Council’s central role in multilateral counterterrorism since 9=11, there exists no comprehensive and coherent empirical measurement of its activity onterrorism. This research gap has resulted incontradictory assessments concerning the beginning, the regularity, and the consistency of the Council’s activity on terrorism. In an effort to introduce more academic rigor to terrorism studies, researchers need to sys tematically address this deficit. This article makes a fundamental contribution by intro ducing a new dataset, the UN Security Council and Terrorism Dataset. It outlines the problems of previously available data and specifies the materials and methods used for the creation of the dataset. It continues by presenting key results from this unpre cedented data collection effort and illustrates general trends in the Council’s activity on terrorism. Based on this extensive empirical research, it finds that the UN Security Council’s activity on terrorism has evolved more regularly and consistently since 1946 than previously thought. This conclusion indicates new directions for future research.