I read this on the way back home this evening, and it was interesting – a paper by a pair of Zurich-based economists who set out to demonstrate how the decision to become a suicide bomber can be rational, and doesn’t necessarily run counter to economic principles of utility.

The whole thing is worth a read, but its chief interest for me was that it came as a reminder that insanity is to psychoanalysis as dark matter is to physics – something hazy and indistinct used to fill the chasm that exists between what we can measure, define and understand, and what we can observe as extant but not explain. While it may briefly satisfy a theoretical gap, it doesn’t absolve the inquiring mind of the duty to push deeper for more worthy explanations. The most common reasons suggested for suicide terror are madness and hate, but the paper successfully argues that these are minor influences in the decision-making process that leads to an attempted suicide bombing. The paper sets out some of the (many and varied) alternatives, splitting them out into three distinct categories:

• posthumous effects: rise in the social and monetary status of the attackers family; immortality of the attacker; accomplishment of political, religious and social goals.
• announcement effects: admiration and rise in status of the attacker before the attack.
• defection effects: negative consequences arising in case the attacker does not carry out the attack.

Aside from that, the paper also carries the stories of Wafa Idris, the first female Palestinian suicide bomber, and Dareen Abu Aysheh, who detonated a bomb at an Israeli roadblock a month later. Since Idris, the Palestinian territories have become the area second most targeted by female suicide bombers, but at the time, cases such as Idris’ were a rarity. In her book, Army of Roses, Barbara Victor describes Idris as “talented… married and divorced because she was sterile”; of Abu Aysheh it was said by her brother that “[s]he was sure that [she] would be killed for nothing, maybe at a roadblock or when our houses are bombed, and she used to say that it is better to die for a reason”. In the absence of the suicide-bombing industry that would come to utilise the effects outlined above, these two women – and many others besides – used suicide bombing as a way to validate their own lives and their positions within society. Even by strictly utilitarian standards the logic makes pernicious sense.

This is the outrage that underpins the claim – briefly fashionable in the media, now thankfully on the wane, although still prevalent, at least on the British street – that Islam is a violent religion. The simple truth is that any population – even the most stoic, resolutely middle-class British or American WASPs – will, when placed in conditions similar to those under which the Palestinian population has laboured, eventually turn to violent resistance and extremism. The solution to this isn’t bombs, roadblocks and walls, it’s to remove the depredations (which, unerringly, tend to be found in the form of bombs, roadblocks and walls) that drove that population to its extreme in the first place.

Finally, this footnote – of all things – perked my interest. The writers say:

…the terrorist activity level is not modelled as a continuous variable with the maximum level being suicide attack (see eg. [J.P.] Azam [Suicide bombing as inter-generational investment] 2005).

Two thoughts emerge from this – first, why should suicide bombing be modelled on a continuous scale with other acts of terrorism? There’s no evidence to suggest progression – that a sufficiently hardened terrorist will, eventually, commit a suicide attack. And secondly, this leads to the idea that suicide bombing and other forms of terror are strictly non-analogous. To be a terrorist is to be a killer, a murderer, a methodical, calculating – and unsacrificing – designer of plots to cause havoc and death. A suicide bomb, however, is an act of desperation, a statement of self-sacrifice, and ultimately inward-facing. As this paper proves, suicide bombing is, more often than not, a strictly utilitarian decision, which is a somewhat sanitised way of saying that, for the bombers, the benefits of dying outweigh the negatives. Idris and Abu Aysheh would never have considered “conventional” terror, because any act of terror that did not result in their deaths would have missed the point. What horrors must a community suffer to make that course of action a rational one?

Anyway, the paper’s a good read, so I recommend at least glance.