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Robert Pape, Director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism and University of Chicago political scientist, dispels myths about ISIS and suicide terrorism and discusses the potential power of grassroots efforts to influence foreign policy.
Robert Pape, University of Chicago
Robert Pape is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago specializing in international security affairs. He is the Director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism and his current work focuses on the causes of suicide terrorism and the politics of unipolarity. Recent publications include Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It and Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. His commentary on international security policy has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, as well as on Nightline, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NPR. Before coming to Chicago in 1999, he taught international relations at Dartmouth College and air power strategy for the USAF's School of Advanced Airpower Studies. Pape received his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago in 1988.
Your 2005 book, Dying to Win, documents a number of remarkable findings about suicide terrorism. Who are suicide terrorists, and what are they after?
For the most part they're responding to the military occupation of a community that they care a lot about.
I put together the first complete data set of suicide attacks after 9/11. I did that because, like many people who come into suicide terrorism, I thought I was going to figure out when an Islamic fundamentalist goes from being a devout, observant Muslim to somebody who then is suicidally violent. But there was no data available, so I put together this complete database of suicide attacks around the world from the early 1980s to 2003.
I was really struck that half the suicide attacks were secular. I began to look at the patterns and I noticed that they were tightly clustered, both in where they occurred and the timing, and that 95 percent of the suicide attacks were in response to a military occupation.
And military occupation matters because it represents not exactly how many soldiers are on a piece of soil, but rather control...