Customer Reviews

Understanding Terrorism and Political Violence: The Life Cycle of Birth, Growth, Transformation, and Demise

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Terrorism, defined as attacks on civilian populations with the aim of imposing harm on non-military personnel and property, has been understood for many years as generally a thoroughly rational and calculated attempt at gaining psychological advantage by groups that cannot gain by increasing their direct military confrontation with the enemy. However extensive the damage done, and in the case of nuclear or biological terrorism this damage can be extreme, the point of attacking defenseless civilians is always mainly psychological: break the will of the enemy or establish a reputation that improves the capacity to recruit new combatants (Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005; Scott Atran, The Moral Logic and Growth of Suicide Terrorism, The Washington Quarterly 29:2 (2006) pp. 127-147).

What is truly and stunningly new is suicide terrorism, where individuals willingly embrace certain death to further the terroristic aims of the groups to which they belong. There were, for instance only 81recorded suicide attacks in the decade of the 1980's, while there were 460 such attacks in 2005 alone. It is not difficult to see why a terrorist organization would want to carry out suicide missions, both for psychological and logistical reasons. Al Qaeda deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri, for instance, argues in "Knights Under the Prophet's Banner" that "the method of martyrdom operations is the most successful way of inflicting damage against the opponent and the least costly to the mujahideen in casualties" (cite in Atran, 2006).


But, what are the motivations of the suicidal attackers? Why are there so many more of these attackers than ever before? It would be easy to answer this if we could attribute suicide terrorism to one or two particular groups (e.g., Al Qaeda), but such groups are generally loose associations of locally-rooted and small networks that do not in any sense take orders from a central authority. Students of terrorism have generally offered explanations that further their own political agendas or theoretical predispositions at the expense of explanatory power. In this volume, Gupta goes through these pseudo-explanations quite carefully and exposes their shortcomings (see also Atran, 2006). Gupta's alternative explanation is very persuasive, although I believe there is an element from Atran's explanation that should be added to Gupta's.


Let me note first that Gupta's book is an excellent introduction to the topic for the uninitiated, as well as a must read for the expert who may be unacquainted with his interpretation of the phenomenon. Gupta uses contemporary behavioral game theory and other experimental evidence to validate his claim that we all harbor both self-regarding and other-regarding preferences. The self-regarding preferences are those commonly studied in biology and economics, but the other-regarding preferences are what make humans truly human and capable of identifying with groups and cooperating effectively in large numbers. In particular, many people identify with large groups and include the welfare of the members of these groups in their personal objective function, so their behavior becomes a balance between self-interest and the goals of the groups to which they belong. When the latter goals become paramount, individuals will be willing even to sacrifice their lives to further the welfare of their groups. This is a simple, direct, and I believe ultimately correct analysis of the situation. Scott Atran, in various papers including the 2006 article cited above, adds an important point. Humans have a strong predisposition to identify with supernatural religious and quasi-religious world views, and these views immeasurably strengthen perceived group-interests. Suicide terrorists, he argues, are motivated by the vision of a whole new world order based on a religious (Al Qaeda) or secular (communist or fascist) vision. I do not think it is an accident that Islamic fundamentalism had to wait until the collapse of communist millenarianism before it could begin to act on an international scale: there appears to be room for only one global millenarian movement at a time.


There is a temptation to treat such millenarian movements as themselves pathological, but Gupta does not succumb. And rightly so. All the freedoms we enjoy today were fought for and won by groups with a millenarian vision of a better society, and doubtless the advance of freedom in the future will depend on the brave actions of such visionaries. In the present era, lovers of freedom must condemn both terrorism in democratic countries, and quite independently, Islamic fundamentalism with its goal of imposing a religious orthodoxy upon national political systems, as intrinsically opposed to an emancipated society.

Personally, I do not abhor the moral absolutism of a Taliban terrorist; rather I abhor terrorism and the goals of the Taliban. I appreciate, by contrast, the moral absolutism of freedom fighters everywhere. "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," Barry Goldwater once said. Here, here!

Gupta is a fine humanist with a touching and empathetic writing style that matches his erudition and veracity. He also speaks in part from personal experience, as he recounts in his discussion of Maoist terrorism in Bengal.