I Hope I Die before I Get Old

ABSTRACT

We explore the supply side of the market for suicide attackers. While the strategic edge of suicide attacks for certain terrorist organizations has been thoroughly explored, the motivation of the suppliers remains quite mysterious. We develop a model of the supply of suicide attacks, the motivation of which is expressive but time inconsistent. The model implies terrorist organizations to provide a commitment device in exchange for the ‘services’ of those suicide attackers that do not suffer from any mental or physical burden of life. By contrast, suicide attackers that do suffer from some sufficiently severe burden of life are not reliant on any commitment device and should therefore be expected to more frequently act as lonesome-wolf attackers.

KEYWORDS:

• Conflict
• national security
• suicide attacks
• terrorism

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D74
• D91
• F52
• H56

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Mario Ferrero, Lena Gerling, Helena Helfer, Kim Kellermann and Aloys Prinz for various discussions and many helpful comments. I also gratefully acknowledge particularly constructive comments by two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The precise numbers differ to some extent between authors and databased (Crenshaw 2007). These numbers have been taken from Pape (2005).

2. LTTE stands for Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam; see details in Bloom (2005, chap.3).

3. Excellent overviews are given by Bloom (2005) and Merari (2010) as well as in the volume edited by Gambetta (2005).

4. See, among others, the analyses by: (Pape 2005, 346–347, 2003; Berman and Laitin 2005, 2008; Bloom 2005, 76–100; Iannaccone and Berman 2006; Krueger 2008; Merari 2010; Berman 2011, 157–182; James 2018).

5. According to a Palestinian security officer, the cost of such a bomb is around 150 US-Dollars; see Hassan (2001); Gambetta and Hertog (2016, 25).

6. This applies not only to young school shooters but more generally to a different subset of mass shooters. It should be noted, though, that they typically have feelings of being victim of mistreatment for which the mass shooters seek revenge; see Bonanno and Levenson (2014) and Fox and DeLateur (2013).

7. Assume the individual to be risk neutral.

8. By contrast, one could claim the extra utility generated by the described self-feeding process to rise as time $b$ moves toward $t=0$ and then endogenize the dynamics in such a way. However, doing so and then finding some optimal point $b$ is beyond the reach of this paper, since it had nothing to add to the essential implications of our model as long as we assume $b<h$.

9. For an analysis of the Palestinian case, see Sayre (2009).

10. Possibly only in the form of some unpleasant expectation of something that might develop in the future.

11. Quoted from BFMTV (2015). Translation by the author.