The Globalization of Martyrdom

By Assaf Moghadam

In today’s edition of the New York Sun, Hillel Halkin wonders whatever happened to Robert Pape, the University of Chicago professor who authored Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. In his book, Pape argues that the connection between suicide attacks and religion is exaggerated, and that suicide terrorism is “mainly a response to foreign occupation.” Halkin argues that Pape’s thesis hardly stands the test of reality, citing newspaper headlines from Iraq that report about scores of victims of suicide bombings aimed mainly at Shiites, which are hardly the source of the occupation in Iraq.

Already in 2005, I suggested in an op-ed published in the International Herald Tribune that the link between suicide terrorism and occupation is weakening as the tactic of suicide attacks is becoming increasingly globalized—a phenomenon I termed the “globalization of martyrdom.” I suggested that suicide attacks carried out by Palestinians and Tamils, as well as by the PKK and Hizballah were part of a traditional pattern of suicide attacks occurring mostly in the context of geographically localized conflicts—employing mostly local recruits and conducting attacks locally.

Since the mid-1990s, that traditional, localized pattern of suicide attacks has been accompanied by a globalized variant. This “globalization of martyrdom” implies that suicide bombers increasingly cross geographic boundaries—as evidenced, for example, by the high ratio of foreigners among suicide bombers in Iraq. Unlike traditional groups, the organizations responsible for globalized suicide attacks are transnational in nature and aspirations, and hence carry out their attacks outside of the traditional conflict zone.

While traditionally, suicide attacks have been perpetrated by both religious and secular organizations, the globalized variant of suicide attacks are planned and executed mostly by Salafi-Jihadist organizations, i.e. Al Qaeda and associated movements.

In an extensive critique of Dying to Win, I also challenged Pape’s contention that suicide terrorism “works.” In contrast to his argument that organizations perpetrating suicide attacks achieved their objectives in over fifty percent of the cases, I showed that at best, the objectives were achieved in only a quarter of all the campaigns. In addition, in that article I argued that Pape all but ignores the religious goals of Al Qaeda and other Salafi-Jihadist groups.

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