Over the course of the last twenty-five years, suicide attacks have emerged as one of the most effective methods used on a large scale by terrorist organizations. Whether by bomb vest, car bomb or some other means of destruction, the willingness of an individual to sacrifice their own life in the course of an attack is a significant force multiplier when employed against conventional security regimes, which tend to focus on capturing and punishing the perpetrator of an attack, rather than preventing the attack.
On its face, suicide terrorism may appear as it is not rational for an organization to pursue; they are
guaranteed the loss of a devoted follower for possibly negligible gain. However, the strategic nature of suicide bombing. In addition, the tactical advantages to a terrorist organization, such as increased lethality, ease of logistical planning, operational security, and reduced cost.
Given that there have been very few cases of suicide attacks which are unconnected to some larger terrorist group, and given the operational effectiveness and strategic rationality of suicide attacks, it is reasonable to conclude that suicide attacks are primarily organizational phenomena. However, it is obvious that there is still an individual component—individuals must still initiate the attack. So there must be a link between the organization and the individual, in which the individual is identified, recruited and/or coerced by the organization into becoming a suicide bomber.
This article develops a methodology for modeling terrorist organizations in their efforts to recruit suicide bombers. It treats “terrorist organizations” primarily as organizations which engage in terrorism, rather than as terrorists who have coalesced into organizations. As such, it presumes that terrorist organizations, like other organizations, delineate roles in intelligible ways. One of the roles delineated, to either an individual or a group, is to develop the criteria for who will be recruited to become a suicide bomber. In reality, the criteria may be explicitly or implicitly defined; terrorists may recruit like the US Marines do, with a clearly defined (explicit) list of attributes which they look for in potential candidates. In contrast, terrorists may recruit more implicitly, simply looking for individuals who have an undefined set of attributes which “feel right” to the recruiter. For this analysis effort, for ease of discussion, we treat their preferences as if they were explicitly defined.
Given that there is a list of criteria, there is a wide array of theories for the attributes that terrorist handlers “look for” when recruiting a suicide bomber. Conventional wisdom says that suicide bombers are drawn from the economically disadvantaged or from the religiously zealous members of a population. Some researchers maintain that social networks of friends and family are a primary means of recruitment; others suggest that recruiters prefer individuals who express feelings of frustration and revenge towards the opposition force. Although it is easy to focus on one factor as “the key,” in all likelihood, for a given terrorist support population, the recruiters actually look for a mix of multiple attributes, each influencing others to an uncertain extent. This leads to our desire to integrate the various explanations derived from separate analyses into a single analysis.
One way of approaching this integration is to aggregate each of the theories of suicide bomber selection into a path model that links the different theories together. From there, data is collected and analyzed using some statistical method to find a relative weighting of each of the explanations for recruiting preferences.
