The suicide weapon

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 35, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 1-32

  Hacking, Ian ^a,b  

^a l'alimentation et l'Environnement

^b UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249349200     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/595626     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, trans. John Oxenford, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1974), 2:212.
2. Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (Glencoe, Ill., 1951), p. 44.
3. Maeve Sheehan, "Suicide Is Caused by a 'Culture of Despair,'" Sunday Independent (Ireland), 26 Dec. 2004, www.independent.ic/national-news/ suicide-is-caused-by-a-culture-of-despair- 487544.html
4. See Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York, 1950), bk. 1, chap. 20, p. 26.
5. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. (Westminster, Md., 1981), vol. 3, q. 64, art. 5, pp. 1462-64.
6. David Hume, "On Suicide," The Philosophical Works of David Hume, 4 vols. (Boston, 1854), 4:546n.
7. Donna Andrew is the author of the forthcoming study The Attack on Aristocratic Vice: Cultural Skirmishes in Eighteenth-Century England.
8. Charles Moore, A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide: To Which Are Added (as Being Closely Connected with the Subject) Two Treatises on Duelling and Gaming (London, 1790).
9. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, trans. James Ellington (1797; Indianapolis, 1964), §6, p. 82.
10. See Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990), p. 70.
11. The classic studies are by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Sex, Evolution, and Behavior (North Scituate, Mass., 1978) and Homicide (New York, 1988).
12. See Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton, N.J., 1986)
13. and Hacking, The Taming of Chance.
14. See Emmanuel Todd, La Chute finale: Essai sur la décomposition de la sphère soviétique (Paris, 1976).
15. See Todd, Le Fou et le prolétaire (Paris, 1979).
16. For an immense set of references, see the "Special Bibliographies" for the "Suicide Bombers" section of the online series called Terrorism, compiled by Glenda Armstrong; www.au.af.mil/au/aul/ bibs/terror07.htm is for 2007.
17. See Cindy O. Ness, "The Rise in Female Violence," Daedalus 136 (Winter 2007): 84-93
18. and Mia Bloom, "Female Suicide Bombers," Daedalus 136 (Winter 2007): 94-102.
19. Ness edited the anthology Female Terrorism and Militancy: Agency, Utility, and Organization (London, 2007).
20. Bloom is the author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York, 2005).
21. On the suicide weapon in Chechnya, see, for example, Anne Speckhard and Khapta Ahkmedova, "The Making of a Martyr: Chechen Suicide Terrorism," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29 (June 2006): 429-92.
22. See Hacking, "Weapons Research and the Form of Scientific Knowledge," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 12 (suppl.) (1986): 327-48.
23. Charles Duhigg, "The Pilotless Plane That Only Looks Like Child's Play," New York Times, 15 Apr. 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/business/ yourmoney/15atomics.html
24. This is a primary thesis of Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York, 2005). He tends to suggest that if a battle is national then the issues are secular, so all that is necessary is to resolve the national problem. That seems to presuppose too Western a conception of the nation.
25. See Peter Chalk, "Tigers Evolve: The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's Developing Suicide Attack Methods," Jane's Intelligence Review 19 (Mar. 2007): 14-19.
26. Thus said the Taliban commander Mullah Hayatullah Khan, who spoke to Reuters late on 20 April by satellite phone from an undisclosed location (Saeed Ali Achakzai, "Taliban's Elusive Leader Urges More Suicide Raids," 21 Apr. 2007, www.reuters.com/articlePrint? articleId=USISL330010). In an earlier interview, 15 November 2001, the BBC asked the questions through a Taliban intermediary over satellite phone. He passed them on to Mullah Omar through a handheld radio and then attached the phone's receiver to the radio for his answers. See "Interview with Mullah Omar - Transcript," news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south-asia/ 1657368.stm
27. See Mike Davis, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (New York, 2007).
28. Jim Muir, "Symbolic Strike at Iraqi Sanctum," BBC News, 13 Apr. 2007, news.bbc.co.uk/go/ pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle-east/6551297.stm
29. Susan Sontag et al., "The Talk of the Town," The New Yorker, 24 Sept. 2001, www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/09/24/010924ta-talk-wtc. She and five other writers for the New Yorker were asked for an immediate reaction to the events. I do not agree with her that courage is a morally neutral virtue. Otherwise, her three succinct paragraphs are a marvel of incisive prose. Some of us may have thought what she wrote, but who else could have written it?
30. Edward Wong and Christine Hauser, "Insurgent Group Says It Bombed Iraqi Parliament," New York Times, 13 Apr. 2007, p. A1.
31. A book from a different point of view, also based on interviews in Israeli jails, is Anat Berko, The Path to Paradise: The Inner World of Suicide Bombers and Their Dispatchers (Westport, Conn., 2007). Berko served previously in the Israeli Defense Forces.
32. See Scott Atran, Robert Axelrod, and Richard Davis, "Terror Networks and Sacred Values: Synopsis of Report Madrid-Morocco-Hamburg-Palestine-Israel- Syria" (2007), www.sitemaker.umich.edu/Satran/files/synopsis-atran-sageman- nsc-brief-28-march- 2007.pdf
33. For earlier contributions, see, for example, Scott Atran, "Mishandling Suicide Terrorism," Washington Quarterly 27 (Summer 2004): 67-90, which includes references to many relevant sources in English.
34. This is a disgracefully short synopsis. See Farhad Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers: Allah's New Martyrs, trans. David Macey (London, 2005), where he describes the martyr concept as always being associated with a radical political agenda. Khosrokhavar is an Iranian-born French scholar of recent and contemporary Iran, author of many books, who in 2008 is visiting at Yale.
35. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge, 2001), §131, p. 123.
36. Berko, The Path to Paradise, has a good deal to say about imprisoned female Palestinians whom she interviewed. Another Israeli study is Female Suicide Bomber: Dying for Equality? ed. Yoram Schweitzer (Tel Aviv, 2006).
37. For a feminist reflection about the same conflict, see Claudia Brunner, "Female Suicide Bombers-Male Suicide Bombing? Looking for Gender in Reporting the Suicide Bombings of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," Global Society 19, no. 1 (2005): 29-48.
38. The use of the suicide weapon by individual Lebanese, Kurdish, Tamil, Palestinian, and Chechen women is discussed by sociologist Rosemarie Skaine, Female Suicide Bombers (Jefferson, N.C., 2006).
39. See Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (Emmaus, Pa., 2003).
40. See also Debra D. Zedalis, Female Suicide Bombers (Carlisle Barracks, Pa., 2004). Zedalis has had a distinguished civilian career in the U.S. Army, most recently as director of the Installation Management Command, Pacific Region. According to her Army CV, her entire career has been spent in installation management in the United States, Europe, and now the Pacific.
41. Jacqueline Rose, "Deadly Embrace," review of My Life as a Weapon by Christoph Reuter and Army of Roses by Victor, London Review of Books, 4 Nov. 2004, www.lrb.co.uk/v26/ n21/print/roseo1-.html
42. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
43. See "Female Suicide Bombers Seek Atonement," Israel News, 1 Oct. 2006, www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3198362,00.html, which reports on a talk by Bloom.
44. For discussion, see, for example, David Lester, Bijou Yang, and Mark Lindsay, "Suicide Bombers: Are Psychological Profiles Possible?" Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 27 (July 2004): 283-95
45. and E. R. Bertoli, "Profiling Martyr Bombers: A Behavioral Optometric Perspective," Journal of Counterterrorism and Homeland Security International 12 (Summer 2006): 44-48.
46. See Reuter, My Life as a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, trans. Helena Ragg-Kirkby (Princeton, N.J., 2004).
47. See Anne Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs' Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber (Oxford, 2005).
48. Ministry of Home Affairs (Singapore), "White Paper: The Jemaah Islamiyah Arrests and the Threat of Terrorism" (Singapore, 2003), p. 15.