Dying to prove a point: The methodology of Dying to Win

Abstract

Dying to Win is one of the most important works on suicide terrorism. It purports to unravel the strategic, social, and individual logic that gives suicide terrorism its coercive value. The methodology that Pape uses to support his various assertions is problematic for three reasons. First, he defines his key terms in such a way as to artificially set suicide terrorism apart from other forms of political violence. Second, in a number of cases Pape selects data from single sources to support particular assertions when other sources of data, used together, could provide more rigorous and useful insights into the phenomenon of suicide bombing. Finally, Pape codes his data on suicide attacks according to a loose set of criteria which, if recoded, calls into question some of his broader conclusions about the strategic utility of suicide terrorism campaigns.

Key words:

• Terrorism
• suicide bombing
• violent extremism

Notes

¹Diego Gambetta (ed.), Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Oxford: OUP 2005).

²Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House 2005). Broader data source for all terrorist attacks are: the RAND Terrorism Chronology which covers attacks from 1968 to 1997; the RAND-MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base which outlines terrorist incidents from 1998 until the present (available online at <www.tkb.org/Home.jsp>); and, the ten-volume series compiled by Edward Mickolus spanning the years 1968 to 2004. The most noteworthy competitor to Pape's database specifically devoted to suicide terrorism is provided in an appendix to Ami Pedahzur's work Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge: Polity 2005), 241–53. Other sources of suicide terrorism data are found on websites devoted to attacks by individual groups, such as the Institute for Conflict Management's listing of such incidents by the LTTE on its South Asia Terrorism Portal <www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/shrilanka/database/data_suicide_killings.htm>.

³Pape, Dying to Win, 9.

⁴Ibid., 10.

⁵Ibid.

⁶Ibid., 64–5.

⁷Robert Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1996).

⁸Pape, Dying to Win, 30.

⁹Ibid., 63.

¹⁰Ibid., 18–19.

¹¹Ibid., 18.

¹²See for example the analysis contained in James A. Piazza, ‘Rooted in Poverty? Terrorism, Poor Economic Development, and Social Cleavages’, Terrorism and Political Violence 18/2 (Spring 2006), 159–77.

¹³Pape, Dying to Win, 182.

¹⁴Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1970), 42.

¹⁶Ibid., 103–4. For example, this claim is repeated on 112–14, 125, 242, 297 n.22.

¹⁵Pape, Dying to Win, 108.

¹⁷According to Pape: ‘All information is based on public sources and the raw data are available at the archive for the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism housed at the University of Chicago’. Dying to Win, 201. It is this author's understanding that the data, however, is not yet releasable to the public for proprietary reasons.

¹⁸Pape defines Salafism as ‘the belief that society should be organized according to the Quran and Sunna only. It is separate from other forms of Islamic fundamentalism, such as Sufism, which are open to more recent sources of Islamic jurisprudence. It is also separate from militant Salafism, which advocates the use of force to achieve Salafi aims’. Dying to Win, 269.

¹⁹Ibid., 270.

²⁰I have adapted these terms from Marc Sageman, who uses them to distinguish between differences in how social networks of Al Qaeda develop in dissimilar regions. Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press 2004), 137–40.

²¹Anouar Boukhars, ‘The Origins of Militancy and Salafism in Morocco’, Terrorism Monitor 3/12 (17 June 2005). Available online at <www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/uploads/ter_003_012.pdf>.

²²Pape, Dying to Win, Appendix I, Campaigns 4, 5, 13, 254–65, 258. I generously count the following incidents as punishment attacks against the Sinhalese population itselt. Campaign #5: incident #3 (government building, Colombo, 7 Aug. 1995); incident #5 (2 oil depots, Colombo, 20 Oct. 1995); incident #8 (market, Batticaloa, 8 Jan. 1996); incident #9 (bank, Colombo, 31 Jan. 1996); incident #20 (World Trade Centre, Colombo, 15 Oct. 1997); incident #23 (Buddhist shrine, Kandy, 25 Jan. 1998); incident # 26 (train station, Colombo, 5 March 1998); incident #45 (ammunition ship, NE coast, 5 June 2000); incident #48 (merchant vessel , north coast, 26 June 2000); incident #50 (hospital, Colombo, 15 Sept. 2000); and, incident #52 (political rally, Medawachchiya, 5 Oct. 2000). Campaign #13: incident #1 (international airport, Colombo, 24 July 2001); incident # 4 (oil tanker, north coast, 30 Oct. 2001); and, incident #6 (crowd, Batticaloa, 15 Nov. 2001).

²³Ibid., 154.

²⁴Ibid., Appendix I, 256.

²⁵Ibid., 258–9.

²⁶Ibid., 58.

²⁷Ibid., 258–9.

²⁸Ibid., 249.