Dying to Win: The strategic logic of suicide terrorism by Robert Pape (Random House, 2005)
Professor Pape has collected groundbreaking evidence to explain the strategic, social, and individual factors responsible for this growing threat and has created the first comprehensive database of every suicide terrorist attack in the world from 1980 until today. He uses this unprecedented research to debunk widely held misconceptions about the nature of suicide terrorism and provide a new lens that makes sense of the threat we face.
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Hezbollah: The changing face of terrorism by Judith Palmer Harik (I B Tauris, 2004)
To the US, Hezbollah represents one of the most dangerous terrorist networks operating today. In Lebanon, it is a democratically elected party. And to the wider world it is the only Arab fighting force to have defeated Israel, forcing its withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000. Harik's work is the fruit of 20 years of research into Lebanon's politics.
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Making Sense of Suicide Missions edited by Diego Gambetta (Oxford University Press, 2005)
For over two years, this team of scholars has pursued an unprejudiced inquiry, investigating organisers and perpetrators of suicide missions. Close comparisons between a range of cases raise challenging further questions: if suicide missions are so effective, why are they not more common? If killing is what matters, why not stick to 'ordinary' violent means? Or, if dying is what matters, why kill in the process?
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Martyrs: Innocence, vengeance and despair in the Middle East by Joyce M Davis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
Davis interviews terrorist trainers, the families of suicide bombers and Muslim scholars with differing opinions on the legitimacy of violence in Islam. From Iran to Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, she reports on the rage that drives these tragedies, crucial for understanding, though not accepting, the fury at and resentment of the US.
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My Life is a Weapon: A modern history of suicide bombing by Christoph Reuter (Princeton University Press, 2004)
Meticulously researched and sensitively written, Reuter argues that popular views of these young men and women as crazed fanatics or brainwashed automatons fall short of the mark.
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Reporting from Ramallah: An Israeli journalist in an occupied land by Amira Hass (Semiotext, 2003)
Hass is the Jewish daughter of concentration camp survivors but has chosen to live in a Palestinian town to provide a first-hand description of what daily life is like for the population, in particular how the Israeli army behaves and the effects of the army's presence. As the Israeli government measures its success in Palestinian deaths, many Palestinians can chart their victory only in terms of the fear they can inspire.
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Suicide Bombers: Allah's new martyrs by Farhad Khosrokhavar (Pluto Press, 2005)
Explores how the suicide bomber relates to the concept of the martyr in fundamentalist Islam compared to Christianity, and looks at what drives these young people to become suicide bombers. Drawing on extensive interviews with jailed Islamist militants, the author examines differing attitudes and investigates transnational networks such as Al Qaeda.
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Understanding Terror Networks by Marc Sageman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)
Sageman challenges conventional wisdom about terrorism, observing that the key to mounting an effective defence against future attacks is a thorough understanding of the networks that allow these new terrorists to proliferate.
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