Life as a Weapon

The Global Rise of Suicide Bombings

Riaz Hassan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138019836
• eBook ISBN: 9781136921063
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Suicide bombing has become a weapon of choice among terrorist groups because of its lethality and ability to cause mayhem and fear. But who carries out these acts, and what motivates them? By undertaking analysis of the information in the most comprehensive suicide terrorism database in the world, Life as a Weapon seeks to question and in turn undermine the common perception that the psychopathology of suicide bombers and their religious beliefs are the principal causes.

Instead, the book presents a cocktail of motivations that drive suicide bombers, and explains how their actions achieve multiple purposes – community approval, political success, liberation of the homeland, personal redemption or honour, refusal to accept subjugation, revenge, anxiety, defiance. Since the configuration of these driving factors is also specifically related to the circumstances of political conflict in each different country, it is only through gaining understanding and knowledge of these conditions that appropriate policies and responses can be developed that will protect the public and counter the scourge of suicide bombings.

Life as a Weapon is a pivotal text in the discussion surrounding suicide bombings, and as such it is of relevance to undergraduate students, postgraduates, and researchers working in areas such as Security Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Terrorism, Criminology and Political Science.

1 Global trends in suicide bombing, 1981–2006

Contemporary studies and commentaries on suicide bombing do not offer a concise or even a commonly agreed definition of the concept. More often than not authors use definitions that highlight a certain feature of the act that emphasises the focus of their respective study and analysis. For example, Diego Gambetta and contributors to his edited volume use the term ‘suicide mission’ in order to extend the scope and coverage of their analysis (Gambetta 2005). Mia Bloom, Mohammad Hafez, Robert Pape, Ami Pedahzur and Shaul Shay explicitly use the term ‘suicide terrorism’ but with a nuance that emphasises one or more motivational attributes germane to their analysis (Bloom 2005; Hafez 2006, 2007b; Pape 2005; Pedahzur 2005; Shay 2004). In the case of these authors it tends to be political resistance and altruism. They all use the terms ‘suicide bombing’, ‘suicide terrorism’ and ‘suicide attacks’ interchangeably.

Others, like Raphael Israeli, on the other hand, insist that the term ‘suicide terrorism’ be used only to describe the violence of Muslim suicide bombers, implying that relatively neutral terms such as ‘suicide bomber’ are too weak and insufficiently condemnatory (Israeli 1997, 2003). He, along with Anat Berko, Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg, and Michael Walzer, sees suicide bombings as homicidal killing (Berko 2007; Oliver and Steinberg 2005; Walzer 2004). Farhad Khosrokhavar, Nasra Hassan, Talal Asad, Ivan Strenski, Scott Atran and Mohammad Hafez use the term ‘suicide bombing’ interchangeably with the altruistically coded terms ‘martyrdom’ and ‘sacrifice’ (Khosrokhavar 2005; N. Hassan 2001; Asad 2007; Strenski 2003; Atran 2003, 2006; Hafez 2006, 2007b). Christopher Reuter uses the term ‘suicide bombing’ but is critical of the indiscriminate labelling of its perpetrators as terrorists (Reuter 2004). He favours a definition that accurately describes the nature and causes of its occurrence. Similar tendencies are discernible in the works of other scholars and commentators (Crenshaw 2007).

There is general consensus, however, that suicide bombings are a form of militant resistance and an integral part of deadly violence between the state and nonstate actors in the modern world. They are mainly sponsored by the weaker non-state entities engaged in asymmetrical conflicts with well-armed state armies. They serve the political interests of the sponsoring organisations in two ways: by coercing an adversary, and by giving sponsoring organisations an advantage over their rivals in terms of moral and material support from sympathetic constituencies. The evidence and analysis presented in this chapter will show that the frequency and lethality of suicide bombings have increased significantly, along with their geographical range, over the past three decades, and they are now regarded as a major threat to national and international security around the world. The data and analysis of the trends are based on the Flinders University Suicide Terrorism Database.

The Flinders University Suicide Terrorism Project

The Flinders University Suicide Terrorism Project was established in 2005 through a grant to the author from the Australian Research Council. A key objective of the research project was to construct a database of suicide bombings between 1981 and 2006, using primary and secondary data. The secondary data involved a census of all suicide attacks during this period. The primary data were to be gathered by interviewing leaders and members of the terrorist organisations which use suicide bombings as a weapon (such as Tamil Tigers, Hezbollah, Hamas, Taliban, Al Qaeda and Laskar-e-Toiba) and supplemented by interviews with survivors, families, recruiters and trainers of suicide bombers.

But following the enactment of Australia’s counter-terrorism laws in 2005 and the explicit advice of the then Australian attorney-general delivered to me in person at a meeting in Adelaide, Australia, on 15 November 2005, that I ‘must follow the law’, I was obliged to revise the research design and abandon interviews with the leaders of the terrorist organisations, suicide bombers, their recruits, trainers, families and survivors. The new strategy involved interviewing counter-terrorism officials and journalists in some of the major sites of suicide bombings. For logistical reasons, to do with time, expense, permissions and access to these people, this strategy could only be partially followed and produced only limited amounts of information that could be regarded as primary or reliable.

This development had a serious impact on the original objectives of the study. It also had obvious implications for ‘academic freedom’ as it prevented me from pursuing a bona fide publicly funded academic research project. The government stance over the research became a subject of national and international attention (Bonner 2006; Shepherd 2006; Edwards and Stewart 2006; O’Neill 2006; Healy 2008). It also became one of the first concrete examples of how Australia’s counter-terrorism laws were limiting academic research (MacDonald and Williams 2007). Unfortunately Flinders University administration, the Australian Research Council and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia did not offer any practical or strategic help to counter the government’s interference in the research project. I was then forced to revise the study, which meant building the suicide bombing database as I had originally envisaged and largely relying on it for my investigation and analysis of the research problem.

This was a big setback as I had hoped that the primary interview material would allow me to explore rigorously not only the political dimension of the act of suicide bombing but, equally importantly, the ideas and motivations for the act of suicide on the part of the sponsoring organisations as well as individual perpetrators. As signalled in the Introduction, a key objective of this study was to explore the expression(s) of altruism, if any, in the act of self-destruction by the perpetrators of suicide attacks. Several studies routinely report claims of the leaders of the sponsoring organisations and individual perpetrators but without solid evidence to back up such claims. This issue would still be explored but not as comprehensively as I had originally envisaged.

The Flinders University Suicide Terrorism Database

The work on the Flinders University Suicide Terrorism Database (FUSTD) began in late 2005 and was completed by the end of 2007. However, the work of refining it continued throughout 2008. The remainder of this chapter provides an overview of the methodology used to construct the FUSTD and an analysis of suicide bombing attacks between 1981 and 2006, their geographical distribution, relative lethality and targets. Definitional issues are inextricably related to the data on suicide bombing. My initial conceptualisation of suicide bombing was ‘the targeted use of self-destructing humans against a perceived enemy for political ends’. After reviewing the studies mentioned above and other related literature, it became obvious that suicide bombing was a more complex and multidimensional phenomenon than described by this conceptualisation. This led me to rethink its nature and scope and revise my thoughts. The following conceptualisation of suicide bombing attempts to capture its various dimensions:

Suicide bombing is lethal violence involving the targeted use of self-destructing humans against a perceived enemy to create fear and alarm in order to undermine the state’s ability to maintain public order. It is associated with conflicts caused by a configuration of individual and collective actors, public and private grievances, institutional conditions and opportunity structures sanctioned by religious and political philosophies/ideologies and special group affiliations. It has significant communicative and expressive dimensions and is aimed at changing the functional principles of (mainly democratic) political systems by coe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: life as a weapon
• 1 Global trends in suicide bombing, 1981–2006
• 2 Explaining suicide bombings
• 3 Suicide bombings in Iraq
• 4 Suicide bombings in Israel and Palestine
• 5 Suicide bombings in Pakistan
• 6 Suicide bombings in Afghanistan
• 7 Suicide bombings in Sri Lanka
• 8 Suicide bombings: homicidal killing or a weapon of war?
• Epilogue
• Appendix A: Suicide bombing attacks worldwide, 1981–2006
• Appendix B: Islamic sects and sectarian groups in Pakistan
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index