This article emphasizes the similarities between such diverse instances of public-spirited suicide as the Islamic martyrs of yesterday and today, the anarchists, the Japanese kamikaze of World War II, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, and the Christian martyrs under the Roman Empire. It tries to accommodate this disparate evidence within a single two-period, expected utility model of a martyrdom contract, to which volunteers sign up in the expectation of probabilistic earthly rewards. Contract enforcement is ensured by a sufficiently strong stigma, or social sanction, placed on renegades. The main implication for counterterrorism policy is that the sanction should be softened, so as to turn prospective martyrs into apostates.
Arjomand, Said Amir. 1988. The turban for the crown. New York: Oxford University Press.
2.
Azam, Jean-Paul. 2005. Suicide bombing as inter-generational investment. Public Choice122: 177-198.
3.
Berman, Eli. 2003. Hamas, Taliban and the Jewish Underground: An economist’s view of radical religious militias. NBER Working Paper 10004, September.
4.
Berman, Eli, and David D. Laitin. 2005. Hard targets: Theory and evidence on suicide attacks. NBER Working Paper 11740, October.
5.
Bloom, Mia. 2005. Dying to kill: The allure of suicide terror. New York: Columbia University Press.
6.
Dale, Stephen F.1988. Religious suicide in Islamic Asia: Anticolonial terrorism in India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Journal of Conflict Resolution32: 37-59.
7.
de Ste Croix, G. E. M.1963. Why were the early Christians persecuted? Past and Present26: 6-38.
8.
Frend, W. H. C.1965. Martyrdom and persecution in the early church. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
9.
Frend, W. H. C.1984. The rise of Christianity. London: Darton, Longman & Todd.
10.
Frey, Bruno. 2004. Dealing with terrorism—Stick or carrot?Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
11.
Gambetta, Diego. 2005. Can we make sense of suicide missions? In Making sense of suicide missions, edited by D. Gambetta, 259-299. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
12.
Geifman, Anna. 1993. Thou shalt kill: Revolutionary terrorism in Russia 1894-1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
13.
Hamermesh, Daniel S., and Neal M. Soss. 1974. An economic theory of suicide. Journal of Political Economy82: 83-98.
14.
Harrison, Mark. 2004. An economist looks at suicide terrorism. Unpublished manuscript, University of Warwick.
15.
Hassan, Nasra. 2001. An arsenal of believers. The New Yorker, November 19, 36-41.
16.
Hill, Peter. 2005. Kamikaze, 1943-5. In Making sense of suicide missions, edited by D. Gambetta, 1-42. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
17.
Hopgood, Stephen. 2005. Tamil Tigers, 1987-2002. In Making sense of suicide missions, edited by D. Gambetta, 43-76. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
18.
Iannaccone, Laurence R. 2003. The market for martyrs. Unpublished manuscript, George Mason University.
19.
Joll, James. 1979. The anarchists. London: Methuen.
20.
Kalyvas, Stathis, and Ignacio Sanchez-Cuenca. 2005. Killing without dying: The absence of suicide missions. In Making sense of suicide missions, edited by D. Gambetta, 209-232. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
21.
Krueger, Alan B., and Jitka Maleckova. 2003. Education, poverty and terrorism: Is there a causal connection? Journal of Economic Perspectives17: 119-144.
22.
Laqueur, Walter. 2001. Left, right, and beyond: The changing face of terror. In How did this happen? Terrorism and the new war, edited by J. F. Hoge and G. Rose, 71-82. New York: Public Affairs.
23.
Lewis, Bernard. 1967. The Assassins: A radical sect in Islam. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
24.
MacMullen, Ramsay. 1984. Christianizing the Roman Empire, A.D. 100-400. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
25.
Margalit, Avishai. 2003. The suicide bombers. The New York Review of Books, January 16.
26.
Omid, Homa. 1994. Islam and the post-revolutionary state in Iran. New York: St. Martin’s.
27.
Onishi, Norimitsu. 2006. Shadow shogun steps into light, to change Japan. The New York Times, February 11.
28.
Pape, Robert A.2005. Dying to win: The strategic logic of suicide terrorism. New York: Random House.
29.
Pinguet, Maurice. 1993. Voluntary death in Japan. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
30.
Rapoport, David C.1984. Fear and trembling: Terrorism in three religious traditions. American Political Science Review78: 658-677.
31.
Reuter, Christoph. 2004. My life is a weapon: A modern history of suicide bombing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
32.
Ricolfi, Luca. 2005. Palestinians, 1981-2003. In Making sense of suicide missions, edited by D. Gambetta, 77-129. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
33.
Wintrobe, Ronald. 2006. Rational extremism: The political economy of radicalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
34.
Wintrobe, Ronald. Forthcoming. Extremism, suicide bombing and authoritarianism. Public Choice.
