The “Target Selection” Study is a CEACS-based project publicly funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education (SEJ2006-12462) that tries to explain the strategies that terrorist organizations follow by analyzing empirically their deadly attacks. Some terrorist organizations carry out indiscriminate attacks; some others opt for selective killings. Some terrorist organizations focus on attacks against the State, some others attack social groups. How can we shed light on this variation?

This project pursues a twofold strategy to deal with this question:

1. We have constructed a new scheme to theoretically classify the different types of deadly attacks that terrorist organizations carry out. Besides the status of the victim, we stand out that there are two other basic criteria to codify killings:
   1. The form of violence: it gauges the degree of selectivity of the attack (how was the victim selected?);
   2. The aim of violence: it measures the link between the target and the strategy of the terrorist organization (why was the victim killed?)
2. We have built a broad data set that encompasses all domestic terrorist killings within Western Europe from 1965 to 2005. We have applied our new scheme of target selection to more than 4,000 killings carried out by extreme-right, extreme-left and nationalist terrorist organizations. These data should allow the researcher to assess the usefulness of our analytical categories and besides to empirically test hypotheses on how terrorist organizations take decisions on strategy and tactics.

In a nutshell, this project wants to set the ground for rigorous analysis of target selection. To achieve this goal, we propose a new scheme to codify killings and generate several datasets to test the validity of the scheme and to offer hypotheses on terrorist decision-making.