The Business of Martyrdom

For the first time the global number of suicide attacks has declined significantly for three years in a row. Suicide bombing is a technology that has been invented and re-invented at different times in different areas but always for the same purpose: resolving a mismatch in military capabilities between antagonists by utilising the available cultural and human resources. Over the past several years, analysts have produced a large number of monographs and articles examining suicide bombing. The best contributions in this new and growing literature have shed considerable light on the complexity of suicide bombing in practice, particularly regarding the structure of the organisations that deploy suicide bombers and the relationships between these organisations and the recruits whom they utilise in their attacks. Nevertheless, nagging inconsistencies and questions remain. These inconsistencies can be explained by examining suicide bombing as a technological system that integrates human beings, cultures, and devices and directs them toward specific ends. Such an analysis requires that neither the individual bombers nor their sponsoring organisations be the basic unit of discussion; instead, the bombers must be understood as components within a much larger system that has been shaped by a host of social, cultural, and operational constraints throughout its existence. Integrating insights from the historical analysis of other technological systems with the recent literature specifically devoted to suicide bombing therefore allows The Business of Martyrdom to develop a fuller understanding of suicide bombing as a unified yet diverse phenomenon.