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Hard and soft targets: the lethality of suicide terrorism

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Abstract

Many scholars have assumed that suicide terrorism is the most lethal form of terrorism. Increasing lethality is important for the terrorists’ expected ability to coerce target states and may explain the increasing popularity of suicide terrorism since the 1980s. This article analyses statistically the lethality of suicide terrorism and suicide bombings with 96,649 terror incidents in the Global Terrorism Database. The results corroborate the hypothesis that suicide terrorism inflicts more casualties than other terrorist tactics. However, suicide bombings are not associated with a greater increase in the casualty rates as compared with non-suicidal terrorist tactics involving, for example, the use of firearms. Moreover, neither suicide terrorism in general nor suicide bombings in particular are associated with an increase in the count of dead when there are many soft targets to choose from, such as in Palestine and Afghanistan. The lethality of suicide bombings is the greatest when there are many hard targets, such as in Israel.

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Notes

  1. Some scholars use a narrow definition of suicide terrorism by regarding it as an attack in which the death of the perpetrator is a precondition for its success. Critics of this definition argue that, by defining suicide attacks narrowly, researchers ignore a wide variety of terrorists who declared a willingness to die. Thus, in a wider definition, suicide terrorism involves an attack ‘in which the perpetrator professed a willingness to die in the course of the attack’ (Moghadam 2006: 18). Also, the GTD data used in this study uses a wide definition by regarding a suicide terrorist as a terrorist who does not intend to escape from the attack alive. Even if actions can also be used to interpret intentions, knowledge of the perpetrators’ intentions may not always be clear unless declared in advance. It is also possible to only refer to cases of actual self-destruction, but this would lead to missing attacks where the terrorist had declared an intention to die but was killed by someone else, or where the success of the attack required that he would almost certainly be killed by someone else. Thus, all the definitions of suicide terrorisms are problematic in their own ways.

  2. The data for the year 2003 is missing in the GTD data set.

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  1. Jönköping University, Box 1026, Jönköping, 55111, Sweden

    Marco Nilsson

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Nilsson, M. Hard and soft targets: the lethality of suicide terrorism. J Int Relat Dev 21, 101–117 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2015.25

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