Why is terrorism committed

Life as weapon: Reem Salih al-Rayasha, a Hamas suicide bomber, mother of two, killed four Israeli soldiers in It was not certain a person going for work would return in the evening. A home could be suddenly searched, someone brutally killed, a mother raped or father taken away.

A shell could land anywhere destroying everything around. In Sri Lanka, the Black Tigers attached importance to how the community would view their actions: They were glorified in their burial rituals, and an eternal lamp adorned the tombstone of every Black Tiger grave to commemorate the sacrifice. From sociological and economic perspectives, suicide bombings can be linked to altruism as a form of intergenerational investment or an extreme form of saving in which the agent gives up current consumption for the sake of enhancing probability of descendants enjoying benefit of some future public good.

Analysis of Hezbollah suicide bombers in Lebanon shows that incidents of suicide bombing attacks increase with current income and the degree of altruism towards the next generation. Hezbollah suicide bombers come from above-average wealthy families and have above-average levels of education. Altruism is not antithetical to aggression.

In war soldiers perform altruistic actions by risking lives for comrades and country and also killing the enemy.

Altruism can also be socially constructed in communities that have endured massive social and economic dislocations as a result of long, violent and painful conflict with a more powerful enemy. Under such conditions people react to perceived inferiority and the failure of other efforts by valuing and supporting ideals of self-sacrifice such as suicide bombing. But in each case, the proportion of the motivations varied.

For instance, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing in , was a nonpracticing Muslim who became an Islamist militant once his dreams of becoming an Olympic boxer faded. At the time of the attack, he was unemployed.

For him, bombing the marathon seemed to allow him to become the heroic figure that he believed himself to be. On the other hand, his younger brother, Dzhokhar, never seemed to embrace militant Islam. He smoked marijuana, drank and chased girls — hardly the actions of a Muslim fundamentalist. He was a highly observant Muslim who objected to American foreign policy. He was unmarried, both his parents were dead, he had no real friends and a dreaded deployment to Afghanistan loomed.

The United Nations has spent more than 20 years trying to form a consensus on what constitutes terrorism, but has yet to succeed.

Sticking points are usually about conflicting national interests and unwillingness to change national legislative traditions. Having sat in some of the meetings, Schmid noted during a presentation on terrorism at a symposium in that the political value of the term to individual nations continued to prevail over a legal definition that would make it universally punishable. But the political value in the U. Lakoff says the definition of terrorism will always be subjective and that it lies somewhere within crime and war, though the three words often overlap and can conflate one another.

Since former President George Bush declared the War on Terror after the September 11 attacks in , people might only see terrorists as someone affiliated with well-known terrorist groups such as al-Qaida or the Islamic State. This hard-line definition can lead to preconceptions about what religions terrorists align with, languages they speak or the color of their skin.

A national correspondent for the Washington Post wrote an article claiming he should not be called a terrorist. But there is no reservation in the mind of an authority on the subject to call Roof or Planned Parenthood killer Dear terrorists; their ideologies are clear. Erin Miller is the program manager at the Global Terrorism Database, which is funded in part by the Department of Homeland Security and considered an authority across all lines of race, party affiliations and countries.

Miller and her team at the University of Maryland have compiled information about more than , terrorist attacks across the world between and Their numbers are often cited in leading news reports, as well as by the federal government. We always try to avoid those. She says their definition of terrorism is fairly inclusive. Download the Brief. Download the Methodology.

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