Not By Bread Alone

If you haven’t already read it, you might want to take a look at Princeton economist Alan Krueger’s article in The American on his study of the factors that lead people to adopt terrorism. He’s basically more successful in identifying the factors that aren’t significant causes of becoming a terrorist: poverty and lack of education. He concludes his article:

To under­stand who joins terrorist organizations, instead of asking who has a low salary and few opportunities, we should ask: Who holds strong political views and is confident enough to try to impose an extrem­ist vision by violent means? Most terrorists are not so desperately poor that they have nothing to live for. Instead, they are people who care so fervently about a cause that they are willing to die for it.

To my mind the most important conclusion to draw from Dr. Krueger’s findings is that people don’t kill themselves because they’re poor or because they’re uneducated nor, IMO, for any other purely objective reason. Not every action has a purely materialistic explanation and that’s a point that some are going to find pretty hard to come to terms with.

There have other studies of the causes of terrorism and most have shared Dr. Krueger’s conclusions. Robert Pape in his book, Dying to Win: the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (yes, I recognize that terrorism and suicide terrorism are not synonymous) concludes that occupation was a major cause of suicide terrorism. That well may be but I think there’s another factor, too.

I think that suicide terrorism requires a sense of entitlement coupled with a sense of deprivation. Note that neither the entitlement nor the deprivation need be objectively true.

As a last thought I frequently wonder how students of suicide terrorism disaggregate real suicide terrorism from what’s been called “assisted suicide terrorism”. I’d think it would make a difference.