Citation

Canter D. Twenty-First Century Society 2006; 1(2): 107-127.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/17450140600913431

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The commonly held assumption that suicide bombers are driven by direct experiences of deprivation and flagrant injustice is not supported by any strong evidence. The equally popular belief that they must be severely mentally disturbed is also not confirmed by studies of those bombers who have survived. Further, it is clear that suicide bombing is not limited to one religious group. Therefore, although there are ideological and religious aspects to the belief systems of many bombers they do not explain why any given person would actually carry out the attack. There is thus a value in giving more attention to the psychological and social psychological processes by which individuals become radicalised to the point that they will take their own lives as part of killing others. It is proposed that consideration of the parallels between suicide bombing and other forms of suicide, as well as other violent crimes, will assist an understanding of how educated, apparently Westernised, citizens could perpetrate the July 2005 bombings in London and the September 11 destruction in the USA. The limited material available on the experiences of suicide bombers suggests that some at least are most readily understandable from the viewpoint of group facilitated, self-destruction rather than being strongly driven by sophisticated understanding of guerrilla strategies or political or religious dogma. Analogies to spree killing or mass cult suicides are therefore illuminating. Even individual, depressive suicides throw some light on what may be the cognitive processes that enable people to carry out such destructive acts. Central to all these processes are two focal aspects of the bombers' cognitions, (a) a ?cognitive simplicity? that makes a very stark distinction between the ?in-group? the bomber identifies with and everyone else, and (b) the belief that the ?out-group? is implacably set on an immovable path that denies the ?in-group's? identity so that suicide is the only way of influencing that ?out-group?. This may be summarised as a ?Samson syndrome? after the Biblical example of a final act of self-destructive vengeance. Therefore, it follows that to reduce the likelihood of such occurrences, beyond the widely discussed political strategies, effort should be put into enriching the conceptualisations held within various subgroups about the diversity of society, encouraging potential bombers to accept the complexity of their own identities.