Understanding Suicide Terrorism: Psychosocial Dynamics

Abstract

Terrorism is a big political and social challenge which the world is facing in modern times. A major variant of modern day terrorism is suicidal terrorism in which, the perpetrators create a threat by killing themselves and inducing mass damage. This creates mass hysteria and a threat to normalcy. Terrorism stripped to the basics is an atypical human behaviour. Terrorism is one of the most potent weapons of psychological warfare that incapacitates the target by precluding predictability. Suicidal terrorism or the act of giving up one’s life in order to damage or terrorize the target has never been understood in its totality. The novelty of this method was entirely in the mental aspect, the willingness of the suicides to cause their own death, the willingness of the organizations to sacrifice them and the support of the social milieu for such forms of terrorism. Suicide attacks are an extreme form of terrorism. The number of such attacks was small in the 1980s and 1990s. The number of scholarly publications grew after the dramatic attacks of 9/11 (2001), and continued to grow in the following years. Only a small minority of the growing body of works on suicidal terrorism have specifically focussed on the psychological aspects of this phenomenon. Psychology and Sociology have been greatly underrepresented in the academic literature on suicide terrorism. Thus, this book is an important addition to our body of knowledge.