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SUICIDE CAR BOMBS HAVE BECOME A COMMONPLACE AND VIRTUALLY daily event in conflicts such as those taking place in Iraq or Afghanistan.* When an attack occurs, we make assumptions about the intent and motivation of the driver and the organization that sent him (and increasingly, her). Often, such attacks in an Islamic context presume that the act is a deliberate Istish'hadi (martyrdom) operation. This paper challenges the basic assumptions about how the concept of martyrdom has been constructed in the literature until now. Using the little-known case of the IRA's proxy bomb campaign in Northern Ireland in 1990, we demonstrate how complex these operations are in reality.
A plausible assumption for most observers of terrorist movements is that such groupings, given their tendency to frequently operate outside societal norms, are relatively immune to the vicissitudes and pressures of public opinion. In fact, most terrorist movements, like political parties, are ultimately power seeking, perceiving themselves as the future leaders of their respective community. This is especially the case when the conflict in question relates to ethnoreligious and territorial disputes. Consistent with Mao's theory that guerrillas must live among the people as a fish moves through the sea, terrorists operate within certain parameters of the public and, for reasons explored in this article, are both cognizant of and susceptible to how they are perceived by members of their ethnic-religious community and by rival groups as well as international public opinion.
This sensitivity to public support occasionally means that when the terrorists engage in tactics that are perceived to be more radical or violent than that which their publics have become used to tolerating, the movement risks the consequences of backlash. It thus would seem to follow that terrorists may be circumscribed not only in the kinds of strategies they can pursue but also in the immediate tactical methods they can deploy. The main problem to date with analyses of terrorist incidents has been that we often take the event at face value and work backwards to determine motivation and intention when in fact, the reality might be quite different. The term "suicide bomb" or "martyrdom operation" gets thrown around far too easily to encompass many behaviors that may not in fact be voluntary.
This paper challenges the...