Making Sense of Suicide Missions
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 0199297975
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Suicide attacks have become the defining act of political violence of our age. From New York City to Baghdad, from Sri Lanka to Israel, few can doubt that they are a pervasive and terrifying feature of our political landscape. Based on a wealth of original information and research, and containing contributions from internationally distinguished scholars, Making Sense of Suicide Missions furthers our understanding of this chilling feature of the contemporary world in radically new and unexpected ways.
Taliban: The True Story of the World's Most Feared Fighting Force
showing a remarkable tenacity in resisting a much larger and better equipped national army. Important in this armed resistance, although only a part of it, have been the actions and ensuing reputation of an elite unit, the so-called Black Tigers (including Black Sea Tigers), a band of specially selected and trained LTTE soldiers whose missions give them little chance of survival.3 The Black Tigers’ reputation is such that, under a current ceaseWre, Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga
published in The New York Review of Books between June and September 2001). Among the possible interpretations is a simple one, suggested by the Wndings of a joint survey of Israeli and Palestinian public opinion53 carried out immediately after the failure of Camp David.54 The main result of the survey is concisely expressed in the heading of the press release: ‘Israelis and Palestinians support the peace process and reconciliation but are less willing to pay the price than their leaders.’
research even though they still compete on the market. This theory is supported in particular by ethnographic evidence: it is certain, for example, that meetings between cells of rival organizations are not infrequent at a local level (Bennet 2003a), especially in relation to defence and policing tasks. Furthermore, we may mention that the three ‘martyrs’ of one of the last suicide attacks carried out before and against the so-called hudna (truce) of June 2003 were members of the three main rival
radicalization of the conXict, as well as various other economic, symbolic, and religious factors. While these may be the ingredients of the cocktail, what is it that keeps them together, ‘precipitating’ them in a wish for martyrdom? Given our presently limited knowledge, any answer to this question is unavoidably conjectural. We can, however, try to ‘assemble’ the pieces and workings of a hypothetical mechanism. This operation is not just optional, for once we consider the individual causes it
deployed in conventional attacks, resulting in no damage to the enemy. This was taken as vindication of the superiority of Kamikaze attacks over conventional methods. Despite the sacriWces of these pilots and their successors, the battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval engagement of the whole war, resulted in a mortal blow to the Japanese navy; four carriers, three battleships (including the super-battleship Musashi), nine cruisers, and ten destroyers, totalling 300,000 tons, were sunk. The only
