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Abstract
While prevailing terrorism research often asks what we can do to eliminate the threat of suicide terrorism, this article switches the question by asking: what problems might the agency manifested in suicide bombing (even if unlawful and irresponsible) solve for us? In critiquing the sociological positivist approach that seeks to uncover the causes of suicide terrorism – and in the process reveals a hidden ideology that sustains the binary of ‘democracy’ versus ‘terrorism,’ and portrays the latter as a threat to the former – I extend upon the legacy of Fanonian violence to conduct a critical double-layered inquiry in connecting suicide bombing to the agency of citizenship. In the first, political layer of inquiry, I borrow from the works of social theorists Engin Isin and Melanie White in arguing that suicide bombing in the Palestinian situation can be read as a moment of ‘acts of deathly citizenship’. However, by pointing to three insufficiencies in the first layer of analysis – the role of rationality, the role of the quotidian, and the role of subculture – I argue for the need of a second, cultural layer of inquiry that looks at suicide bombing not only as a momentary political act, but as a sustained and permeating ‘subcultural script’ of deathly citizenship that challenges the liberal national script founded on the individual pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Natalie Lopez for her research assistance. I am grateful to the editors of the journal for their concrete and helpful suggestions on a prior version of the article. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers whose fruitful insights have strengthened and extended my thinking on the topic. Any errors that remain are mine alone.
Notes
1. Reuter (Citation2004) has also tried to show that suicide bombing has an ancient root in the emergence of the ‘assassins’, a radical offshoot of the Shiite minority in the second half of the eleventh century who, having committed their missions with daggers, ‘never attempted to flee’ and ‘allowed their target's bodyguards to stab them to death’ (pp. 24–25).
2. My use of the term ‘suicide bombing’ does not indicate my misrecognition of its problem as a conceptual term. As the term (along with ‘suicide terrorism’, ‘suicide attack’, or ‘suicide missions’) is a Western construction, it already moves the reader/audience to perceive it in a certain direction. Given that bombing participants rarely see their acts as ‘suicide’ and preferring instead terms such as ‘sacred explosions’ or ‘martyrdom operations’ (Hassan Citation2001, Hafez Citation2006a), one wonders why alternative terms such as ‘sacrificial bombing’ or ‘sacrificial missions’ are not being used in media and scholarly representations. However, since I consider inscribing agency into this violent act as a necessary part of the effort in renaming it, I retain the term in analysis only to translate it into a critical agency of deathly citizenship in the end.
3. For example, see Moghadam's (Citation2006a, Citation2006b) critique of Pape on empirical grounds.
4. Furthermore, the disease narrative that approaches terrorism as if it were a purely biomedical issue fails to see that the discourse surrounding epidemics such as the HIV is already political and ideological – racialised, sexualised, and colonial (see Cohen Citation1999 and Patton Citation2002).
5. The accounts provided by Pedahzur and Bloom echo the kind of stories told by journalist Victor (Citation2003) in her Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers.
6. While some have questioned the merit of Pape's rational-choice model on how he measures the success rate of suicide campaigns (Moghadam Citation2006b), and whether the bombers actually engage in cost–benefit analysis as the militant organisations do (Hafez Citation2006a, 2006b), these internal critiques are nonetheless aimed towards maximising the predictable patterns of suicide terrorism within the positivist aura of certainty (as shown in the ‘multi-causal approach’ discussed earlier).