Suicide Terrorist Attacks: A Comparative Analysis

My design, like Pape (2003), is going to look at suicide attacks but my area of focus is going to be from 1980-2015. This reason for the change is because I want to expand on the data collected by Pape (2003), from the Lexis Nexis data base. Another area of change my research will have is on the properties collected from the data. As citied earlier Pape (2003) looked at three properties I’m only going to look at two. Pape’s main findings are supported by three general patterns he finds in an extensive database he compiled and that he describes as “the first complete universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide”.
The first pattern is that suicide terrorist attacks occur as part of organized campaigns; second, democratic states are uniquely
Pape (2003) believes that democratic states or governments are more likely to be attack by suicide terrorist groups. Pape (2003) makes three arguments why democracies ought to be especially likely to experience suicide terrorism, either as the target or the location of attacks. Pape (2003) notes that "nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel democracies to with draw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Terrorist groups attack democracies because they are perceived to be especially vulnerable to coercive punishment. In other words, democratic publics are unlikely to tolerate the costs imposed by suicide terrorist attacks and are likely to push for changes in state policy that will lessen the likelihood of future attacks (Wade 2007, 332). Second, nationalist groups that utilize suicide tactics must have a reasonable degree of confidence that the state that they are targeting will be somewhat restrained in its response, and terrorists may believe that democracies will exercise this restraint when contemplating retaliation (Wade 2007, 332). Third, attacks may be harder to organize or publicize in authoritarian states, because such states have greater monitoring of groups and individuals, greater restraints on movement, and greater restrictions on the media. In other words, it is relatively less costly and more beneficial to conduct terrorist activity in democratic than authoritarian states (Wade 2007, 332). Basically, Pape (2003) argues that democracies are especially likely to experience suicide terrorism if they are perceived to be occupiers, meaning that suicide terrorism should be understood as a strategic response to perceived occupation by a democracy rather than as the product of any ideology or religion. He does, however, argue that a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied increases