Completed in 2005, Robert Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism is based on extensive research conducted by the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. This book belongs to what one might call the quantitative school of terrorism studies, as it relies mainly on data gathered on suicide attacks and their perpetrators over the last two decades. Its author takes issue with the conclusions of those who stress the importance of the doctrine of Islam in the shaping of the suicide terror phenomenon. Such a debate is part and parcel of a wider dispute within U.S. academia, boosted by 9/11 and its Iraqi aftermath, though it was already rooted in the “Orientalism” battle back in the 1980s. However, it also touches on an ongoing conflict between scholarship and partisanship: Should academics take sides and advocate specific policies, at the risk of submitting their scholarly credentials to the political goals they champion, or should they shun away from politics, at the risk of remaining clad in their ivory tower while social debates rage, uninfluenced by their expertise? The issue of terrorism is crucial to that matter.

Pape states from the onset where he stands. He challenges the cultural preconceptions that he contends shape common wisdom about suicide terrorism in the Al Qaeda era. He attempts to debunk them with numerous facts that the findings of his Chicago Project allowed him to gather. According to him, Islamic fundamentalism plays only a minor role in suicide terrorism worldwide, when compared to secularist movements (such as the Sri Lanka Tamil Tigers and nationalists in Lebanon or Turkey). Also suicide terrorists are neither fanatics and crazies nor disenfranchised slum dwellers: They are better educated and more middle-class than their peer groups. They also have clear political objectives—fighting foreign domination, rather than pursuing jihad—and their strategy is rooted in a realistic understanding of the balance of forces at the world level: They use the most potent of the weapons of the weak against democratic superpowers, compelling them to backtrack. Finally, suicide terrorism works; its efficiency derives from the concessions it manages to extort from democratic states. The whole rationale of the war on terror has to be rethought as it is based on false premises and doomed to failure, the Iraqi fiasco being a case in point.

Such a challenging perspective is definitely refreshing: after all, we are still at pains to make sense of suicide terror (to borrow from another of the books under review), and the phenomenon still looks flourishing, four years and billions of dollars after 9/11. To what extent is that analysis sound? There is no doubt that Pape's work is commendable in many aspects. His chapter entitled “The Demographic Profile of Suicide Terrorists,” for instance, based on a sample of more than 400 suicide attackers, provides especially interesting insights—ones that supplement Marc Sageman's (2004) Understanding Terror Networks. His emphasis on the prevalence of postsecondary education among Arab suicide attackers, their overwhelming working-class and middle-class income, and the decisive part played by socialist or nationalist militants in suicide attacks in Lebanon against Israeli occupying forces is important.

At the same time, other aspects of Pape's overall argument are questionable. For example, he writes: “Under the conditions of a foreign occupation, religious difference—more than Islam or any other particular religion—hardens the boundaries between national communities and so makes it easier for terrorist leaders to portray the conflict in zero-sum games, demonize the opponent, and gain legitimacy for martyrdom from the local community” (p. 80). However, this may not always be the case. Suicide attacks perpetrated by Sunni Muslims in Iraq, for example, targeted foreigners and Shiite Muslims. They also killed, at random, scores of fellow Sunni Muslims. The bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, on August 7, 1998, made many more casualties among Kenyan and Tanzanian citizens than Americans.

Pape is right when he discards the simplistic view that Islam itself leads to suicide terror. However, he attempts to make his point with statistics that are somewhat strange. In his chapter entitled “Demystifying al-Qaeda,” he contends that “an examination of the sixty-six al-Qaeda suicide terrorists who were known citizens of Sunni-majority countries shows that American military presence is a stronger factor than Salafi fundamentalism in predicting who dies for al-Qaeda cause” (p. 109). We are then confronted with figures of Sunni countries with and without “Salafi-influenced populations.” No definition of “Salafi-influence” is provided, let alone the means by which it might have been quantified. On what grounds does Oman have a 100% “Salafi” population (the majority of the Omani population belongs to the Ibadi sect, which abhors Sunni salafism); why does Algeria's population of 31 million have 19 million “Salafi-influenced” citizens, while neighboring Morocco (where a number of political groups and parties refer to Salafism) and Kuwait (where Salafists are, as such, members of parliament) or Syria (where Salafi movements have gone public) are dubbed Salafi free? The Middle East scholarship here is weak, and it does not provide a solid ground to demonstrate that there is no correlation between Salafism (broadly measured as it might be) and Al Qaeda. The comparison between “Salafi-influenced countries” (where the author finds 1 Al Qaeda suicide terrorist per 15 million Muslims) and their supposed non–Salafi-influenced counterparts (1 per 12 million Muslims) does not mean much. In that case, Pape overreaches, and it is all the more regrettable because the other part of his demonstration—the link between U.S. military presence or political influence and Al Qaeda actions—is worthy of interest. Had Pape taken into consideration social science literature focusing on the contemporary Muslim world, he might have embraced a more qualitative approach toward Islamist movements and deciphered the complex relationship between the jihadi branch of Salafism (which developed during the Afghan jihad of the 1980s) and the “martyrdom operations” (amaliyyat istish'hadiyya) advocated by Al Qaeda literature (see, for example, Olivier Roy's Globalized Islam, 2004; and my own Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, 2002). That does not mean that Islam as such is in any simple sense the culprit. However, it does mean that the ideology of jihad—properly put in its political and social context—cannot be discarded as irrelevant.

We arrive here upon some of the very limitations of “terroristology” in its attempts to become a field of knowledge. Is suicide terrorism per se the real issue of current concern, whether it took place in kamikaze Japan, in Sri Lanka Tamil jungles, or in the Kurdish areas of Turkey? Is it the distinctive strategies, tactics, and ideological frames of Al Qaeda? Does it even make any sense to construct suicide terrorism as an object of social science, as a concept, an analytical tool? Is it no more than a collection of symptoms that make up what Durkheim called a preconception (prénotion in French), a sort of grossly shaped image borne out of common wisdom that does not shed much light on social reality and reproduces the doxies of the media?

Such a debate is triggered by Mia Bloom's Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror, also published in 2005. In contrast to Pape's more quantitative approach, Bloom focuses on “what motivates young men and a growing number of young women” to become suicide bombers. “Terrorist groups,” she contends, “appear to use suicide bombings under two conditions: when other terrorist or military tactics fail, and when they are in competition with other terrorist groups for popular or financial support” (p. 1). The book offers a panoramic view of suicide bombing worldwide, starting with the classical references to Jewish sicarii, Hindu thugs, Muslim assassins, and Japanese kamikaze and taking us throughout Palestine, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Lebanon, and Iraq. Other authors such as Farhad Khosrokhavar (Les nouveaux martyrs d'Allah, 2002) or Christoph Reuter (My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, 2004) were keener on introducing a historical perspective, starting with the mass suicide of Iranian youngsters on the minefields of the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s and proceeding through Lebanon and Palestine to 9/11. Bloom, in contrast, displays comparative case studies, seeking to analyze the reasons for the failure or success, in terms of political expediency, of suicide bombing in different locations. She is interested in the tactics that are developed to gain community support, attract news coverage, instill fear in the enemy, raise funds, and compete against political rivals. Hers is a political science approach that owes to “terrorism studies” as exemplified by David Rapoport's work inter alia. At the same time, like Pape, she plays down the religious motivations of suicide bombers and does not have much interest in the social science literature on Muslim societies or Islamist movements. In her chapter entitled “Devising a Theory of Suicide Terror,” she introduces a rational-choice cost-benefit analysis of the phenomenon: “Suicide bombing is unique in the sense that the organizations which use this tactic reap multiple benefits on various levels without incurring significant costs” (p. 76). She contends that “suicide terror often makes its appearance in the second iteration of conflict” (p. 83) when it is deemed more effective than previously used political or military strategies that bore little or no fruit. It is also linked to the kind of community support it might or might not raise: In Palestine, public support for suicide bombings plummeted in 1996–97 when trust in the Oslo peace process was high. Conversely, it reached unprecedented peaks with the second Intifada, particularly in October 2001 (81% rate of approval—while, on this particular month, it also echoed 9/11), and was put to good use by Hamas and Islamic jihad to outbid their Fatah competitor. Projecting Bloom's theory into events that took place after her book was published can convincingly help us understand how Hamas would then capitalize on that strategy to turn its constituency of supporters into an electoral base and win the January 2006 parliamentary elections, while implementing a truce: Suddenly, “martyrdom operations” had become useless to achieve its political goal. It also makes sense of why the stalemate borne out of Hamas's victory at the polls and the subsequent U.S. and European Union economic sanctions against its government's refusal to recognize Israel opened a new window of opportunity for Palestinian Islamic jihad (PIJ). PIJ started anew a suicide bombing campaign, trying to surf on Palestinian fury at the West and Israel to outbid Hamas, now accused of betraying its ideals for the elusive success of electoral politics.

Suicide bombings, in this view, are a means for political mobilization and are implemented (or not) according to their usefulness in reaching that goal. Bloom's sobering analysis makes this point clearly. However, it does not really help us to understand why the climax of suicide bombings—9/11—had such a resonance beyond the Muslim world itself, shaping our very perception of the post–Cold War era's principal sources of danger and fueling anti-U.S. political mobilization in the Muslim world after the downing of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein regimes and the subsequent occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Diego Gambetta's (2005) Making Sense of Suicide Missions edited volume offers a rich array of contributions that allow the reader to reach out to more global perspectives. Nine scholars coming from U.S. and European universities cross viewpoints and analyses on suicide missions and put them in context, making this book the most valuable contribution on the matter, one that moves far beyond the terroristology view. After four chapters dealing with Kamikaze, Tamil Tigers, Palestinians, and Al Qaeda on 9/11, two others contrast them with political suicides such as protest self-immolations (e.g., Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire), and terrorist operations devoid of suicide (e.g., Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, the Irish Republican Army, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, etc.), and one describes motivations and beliefs. All authors bring strong field and disciplinary scholarship to their essays, offering state of the art presentations that raise fundamental questions about the future, and avoid hasty or facile answers. In the concluding chapter, the volume editor wraps up with a reference to Durkheim's seminal work on suicide (Suicide, 1897), banking on the latter's definition of altruistic suicide as implemented by “those who attach low value to their lives in relation to some principle, allegiance, or collective interest that transcends them” (Gambetta, p. 270). “The key in Durkheim's view is that the community of reference, whether a family, an army corps, or a religious sect, be so tightly knit as to generate and enforce the readiness to self-sacrifice” (p. 271).

We could say that in some cases, where social life is reduced to a minimum—or to a Durkheimian state of anomie—self-sacrifice is the mode of action par excellence to achieve meaning anew for the community of reference, through martyrdom and heroism. Ricolfi's chapter on “Palestinians 1981–2003” describes Palestinian society as one “in which social life is frozen and horizons and normal careers do not exist,” where “war and the Intifada are not just the only world but the only social system.” Under such conditions, he contends, “the shortest route to the highest position, since it confers prestige and can bestow eternal glory, is indeed that of the martyr” (p. 115), while elsewhere in the book, Biggs, writing on self-immolations, remarks that “the appeal of martyrdom is that it combines the images of the victim and of the hero.” Those remarks echo Stephen Holmes's statement, in one of the book's brightest chapters: “To attract public attention, suicidal terrorism carries the potential added value that ‘martyrdom’ confers upon it…. Their desire to bear witness before a world audience seems to be an essential reason why 9/11's planners decided to mount an exploit of such staggering magnitude” (p. 159).

Though bearing witness for what, might we wonder? Answers are provided by the core Islamist and Al Qaeda related literature on jihad and its purposes. Regretfully, none of the contributors of this otherwise fine book possesses the academic background or disposition that would have allowed them to venture an in-depth analysis of the discourses of contemporary jihadism or of the culture of martyrdom in the Arab and Muslim world. Such inquiry would seem to be a necessary condition of understanding the most troubling current forms of suicide terrorism, even if one concedes, in the spirit of social scientific “objectivity,” that it is not sufficient, and that we should never rely exclusively on the interpretation of social facts by the actors who perform them (but such interpretation is widely disregarded or reduced to stereotypes in most of the literature about terrorism anyway—a sad testimony to the marginalization of social science studies of the Muslim world in U.S. academia). What 9/11 bears witness to, first and foremost, is that the world has changed, together with the means we have to perceive that change and decipher the categories for its interpretation. The cognitive bookish culture of the twentieth century that was revered in both camps up to the end of the Cold War era—up to November 9, 1989—has been replaced by the culture of the Internet and satellite television, where spectacular terrorism—in its martyrdom garb—provides a key figure, an “image,” a structuring metaphor, for the interpretation and the enactment of social conflict. Such spectacular terrorism addresses a constituency immensely wider than the audience available to print culture, and it is ripe for any kind of secondary use by social actors worldwide, even if vaguely related or unrelated to the specifics of Al Qaeda parlance. In our present context, it might be of interest to think anew of the social and political relevance of the figure of martyrs of the Christian church: to deconstruct the methods through which their fame was staged by new clerical entrepreneurs, and their worship was standardized. They also provided for an entirely new reading of the world of the late Roman empire, one that replaced Greek and Latin philosophy by a set of unheard of value judgments, paving the way for a sea change in cultural perceptions. Suicide missions may then perhaps be seen as a symptom of comparable magnitude and help us to understand what is at stake in the anomie of the neo-Durkheimian world that unfolded between November 9, 1989, and September 11, 2001, and that continues to unfold before our eyes.