When suicide bombers first started getting considerable publicity, it was common to hear refrains about them being poor, uneducated, oppressed, without hope, etc. Only someone undergoing intolerable suffering could resort to such a desperate act. Suddenly the weapons delivery systems were the victims.
However, research repeatedly shows that the typical suicide bomber is middle-class. They produce better results.
Consider a chilling, but compelling recent paper by Efraim Benmelech
of Harvard and Claude Berrebi of Rand. The two ask, in effect, what
makes someone become a suicide bomber? Their answer: "Since there are
returns to human capital in both the productive and the terror sectors,
high-ability individuals will become suicide bombers if the expected
payoff from suicide bombing is higher than their skill-adjusted
expected lifetime earnings in the productive sector."
They test
this proposition using a data base of 148 Palestinian suicide bombers
from 2000-05. And they find that older and more educated suicide
bombers are assigned to higher-profile targets, kill more people, and
are less likely to fail or be caught. In short, there is a match
between human capital, in this grossly distorted sense, and the desired
goal.
And as for the bombers themselves, these authors argue that
the bombers have made, what is for them, a rational choice: There is
enough moral, psychological and sometimes financial payoff from the act
of killing many people to offset the economic loss of their death.
Therefore, the terrorist manager assigns the most deadly tasks to the
highest-caliber people; otherwise, they will not bother. In an awful
way, it makes sense, and it seems to be true. Caught and failed suicide
bombers are conspicuously less educated than those who carry out their
tasks.
The following is from an article by Randall Collins, a sociology professor at the University of
Pennsylvania who's promoting his new book "Violence, A
Micro-sociological Theory." It provides additional insight into why members of the middle-class are more prone to becoming suicide bombers.
The fact that suicide bombers are usually mild-mannered members of the
middle class seems counterintuitive. After all, the middle class tend
to be well-educated, well-behaved, good family members—nothing like the
bloodthirsty tough guys or criminals we imagine when we think of
terrorists. They bear little resemblance to English football hooligans
or rabble-rousers. No other form of violence has a higher proportion of
females than suicide bombers, even though females are usually more
conformist than males.
Why is this so? I suggest it is because suicide bombing is the
easiest form of violence for conventional middle-class people to carry
out, if they decide to commit violence at all.
To grasp the point, we need to first dismiss the myth that it is easy
for someone to act violently. If someone has a sufficiently strong
grievance, the thinking goes, all the person needs to do is get hold of
a weapon and he or she will start killing people. Nothing could be
further from the truth. Sociologists in World War II found that only 15
to 25 percent of frontline soldiers were actually firing their guns.
Later training methods have raised the firing rate somewhat, but the
shooting is almost always very inaccurate. Firing a gun on a range is
quite different from shooting a person. My own research on milder forms
of violence, with fists and feet and clubs, shows that most angry
confrontations end in a standoff, where participants find an excuse to
back down.
A second common myth is that violent people are violent, in part,
because they grow up in a milieu that lacks social controls through
family and school, and are exposed to groups which encourage a code of
violence, whether for crime or self-respect. Again this assumes that
when it gets to the sticking point, it is easy to be violent. But close
studies of gang confrontations and holdups show that criminals are no
more comfortable with violence than soldiers or cops; in fact, they are
even worse at it. Statistically, the average gang member is rarely
violent; gangsters spend most of their time talking tough. When they do
pull the trigger, it is usually wildly, and if someone is hit, it is
often an innocent bystander, not the target of their rage.
Given what seems to be our natural tendency to shy from face-to-face violence, what are the ways around this hesitation?
The first, and easiest, is to carry out violence from a distance, such as dropping bombs from planes or firing artillery over the horizon. This avoids the face of the enemy entirely.
If the enemy must be faced, the second and third methods come into play. Number two involves ganging up on an isolated and essentially unresisting victim. Rioters (and riot-control forces) do their damage
chiefly when a cluster of four or more beats on a single fallen opponent. Gangs, like bullies, are effective mainly when they have a similar ratio of dominance. Police are most likely to commit violence when they greatly outnumber the suspect. In military combat, massacres occur when the enemy has suddenly gone passive, emotionally shocked and incapable of resisting. In this type of violence, emotional dominance
is even more important than physical dominance. This second pathway is a very ugly one, although it is probably the most common form of violence; on a small scale, it is the chief pathway to domestic abuse.
The third pathway, in contrast, is the idealized, honorable form of violence: a staged fair fight. Here the fighters are chosen to be evenly matched. They fight according to a code of rules and within a group that regards itself as having honor: whether duelists in the early modern era, high school tough guys on the playground, or athletes boiling over at an opponent during a game. Such fights always have an audience, which monitors the rules (however violent they may be). The crowd typically supports the fight and keeps the fighters going for the requisite amount of time. From the point of view of the fighter, the crowd helps overcome confrontational tension because the fighter’s attention is more on the crowd than on the antagonism of the opponent.
Which leads to those who take their own lives in the process...
But suicide bombers are different. They usually face their victims alone. They neither threaten their enemies nor try to make them break down emotionally. The secret of their tactic is not to perform it as
violence at all, until the very last second when they detonate the bomb. The tactical advantage of the suicide bomber is to approach as if nothing unusual were happening. There is no confrontational tension because the bomber acts as if there is no confrontation.
Clandestine, confrontation-avoiding violence such as suicide bombing is a fourth pathway around confrontational tension. It succeeds only because the attacker is good at pretending that he or she is not
threatening at all. People accustomed to the typical macho forms of violence are not good at this; gang members would make lousy suicide bombers. But mild-mannered middle-class people are ideal for it. Since
they are not confrontational by nature, they do not have to control a blustering or threatening demeanor that would warn their victims. Self-directed introverts, they do not need to hear cheering as they stalk their prey. Middle-class culture is especially accommodative, adept at maintaining a smooth surface of conventionality. Whatever our private feelings, we learn not to express them on the job, in social situations, or in public. This is good training for carrying a bomb under one’s clothing until the target is so close that massive damage is certain.
Suicide bombing, in other words, is not just a matter of motivation; it is primarily a matter of technique. Violent political movements may embrace it for ideological purposes, but they use it mainly for a very
simple reason: It works.
And from another piece of research...
The freest countries experienced little terrorism; and the same was
true for the most oppressed. It was in the middle--where politics was
unsettled and evolving and governments are often weak--that suffered
the most.
That helps explain Iraq.
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