Dying to Win: the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

Political scientist Robert Pape has created the first comprehensive database of every suicide terrorist attack in the world from 1980 until today. Here he provides a groundbreaking demographic profile of modern suicide terrorist attackers--and his findings offer a powerful counterpoint to conventional assumptions. He also examines the early practitioners of this guerrilla tactic, including the ancient Jewish Zealots, who in A.D. 66 wished to liberate themselves from Roman occupation; the Ismaili Assassins, a Shi'ite Muslim sect in northern Iran in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; World War II's Japanese kamikaze pilots, three thousand of whom crashed into U.S. naval vessels; and the Tamil Tigers in Sri…