Suicide Terrorism, Occupation, and the Globalization of Martyrdom: A Critique of Dying to Win

This article offers a three-pronged critique of Robert A. Pape's book Dying to Win. The first section of the article highlights problems related to the book's definition of key concepts, its assessment of existing research on suicide terrorism, and its presentation of data. The next section challenges the book's argument that suicide attacks have a high success rate of 54 percent. The alternative analysis offered here arrives at a significantly lower success rate of 24 percent. The last section argues that Pape exaggerates the link between occupation and suicide terrorism, especially with regard to the case of Al Qaeda. In this context, a distinction between traditional (localized) and contemporary (globalized) patterns of suicide attacks is introduced. It is argued that the occupation thesis may help explain the traditional (localized) pattern of suicide attacks, but falls short of illuminating the causes of the contemporary “globalization of martyrdom.”