Making Sense of Suicide Missions

Edited by Diego Gambetta

This book attempts to shed light on suicide missions and provide answers to the questions we all ask. Are these the actions of aggressive religious zealots and unbridled, irrational radicals or is there a logic driving those behind them? Are their motivations religious or has Islam provided a language to express essentially political causes? How can the perpetrators remain so lucidly effective in the face of certain death? And do these disparate attacks have something like a common cause? It focuses on four main instances: the Kamikaze, missions carried out by the Tamil Tigers in the civil war in Sri Lanka, the Lebanese and Palestinian groups in the Middle East, and the al-Qaeda 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. For more than two years, the authors have pursued an unprejudiced inquiry, investigating organizers and perpetrators alike of this extraordinary social phenomenon. Close comparisons between a whole range of cases raise challenging further questions: If suicide missions are so effective, why are they not more common? If killing is what matters, why not stick to ‘ordinary’ violent means? Or, if dying is what matters, why kill in the process?

Oxford, UK: New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 452p.