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Karen Rasler

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2007

Karen Rasler
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington

Extract

How many causal paths lead to suicide terrorism? Unfortunately, too many to produce precise predictions about when and where suicide terrorism is likely to occur. Nonetheless, Mia Bloom's, Diego Gambetta's, and Robert Pape's books do an excellent job of addressing this phenomenon with sophisticated theories and empirical findings. While Pape presents a coherent, single theoretical framework for explaining suicide terrorism, Bloom and the contributors in Gambetta's book focus on a range of loosely interconnected causal explanations across individual, organizational, and societal levels. These works also have a rich historical and comparative focus across time and cases. Even so, the fundamental question is how they advance our knowledge about suicide terrorism.Karen Rasler is professor of political science at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Type
REVIEW SYMPOSIUM: UNDERSTANDING SUICIDE TERROR
Copyright
© 2007 American Political Science Association

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References

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