Dying to die: New micro and macro evidence that suicide terrorists are suicidal

The self-sacrifice of suicide terrorists is subject to sophisticated models of altruistic sacrifice. Yet, a simpler account is that it reflects common suicidal tendencies. This paper offers new micro and macro evidence supportive of this hypothesis. At the micro level, the paper compares a sample of suicide and non-suicide terrorists in the United States from 1948 to 2017. Results indicate that suicide terrorists are more likely to display various established suicidal risk factors including history of child abuse, absent parent/s, and relationship troubles. Results from Bayesian Model Averaging indicate that suicide risk factors outperform other individual factors (e.g., ideology and lone-actor terrorism) in explaining suicide terrorism. At the macro level, the paper takes advantage of the cross-national variations in suicidal tendencies to explain the incidence of suicide and non-suicide terrorist attacks worldwide from 1991 to 2014. Results reveal that countries with higher share of deaths from suicide display higher incidences of suicide attacks but similar incidences of non-suicide attacks. However, other contextual factors such as the share of Muslims also predict the incidence of suicide terrorism. The decision of some terrorists to sacrifice their life may well have been subject to over-theorization.