Why do terrorists blow themselves up?

French filmmaker Pierre Rehov interviewed many Palestinians in Israeli jails, arrested following failed suicide-bombing missions or for aiding and abetting such missions, for his film Suicide Killers. Every one of them tried to convince him that that the action was the right thing to do for moralistic reasons. According to Rehove, “these aren’t kids who want to do evil. These are kids who want to do good …” The result - young people who had previously conducted their lives as good people believe that a suicide bombing represented doing something great.

Everyday degradations of Israeli occupation had created collective hatred, making them susceptible to indoctrination to become martyrs. As Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo puts it, “It is neither mindless nor senseless, only a very different mind-set and with different sensibilities than we have been used to witnessing among young adults in most countries”.

Suicide bombings invariably provoke a brutal response from authorities. By injecting fear and mayhem into ordinary rhythms of daily life, such bombings undermine the state’s authority in providing security and maintaining social order. Under such conditions the state can legitimately impose altruistic punishments to deter future violation threatening security and social order. These include punishments meted out to perpetrators and their supporters. The state-sanctioned military actions against the Palestinians, Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, Iraqi insurgents and the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan are examples of these punishments.

But altruistic punishments are only effective when they do not violate the norms of fairness. Punishments and sanctions seen as unfair, hostile, selfish and vindictive by targeted groups tend to have detrimental effects. Instead of promoting compliance, they reinforce recipients’ resolve to non-compliance. Counter-insurgency operations are aimed at increasing the cost of insurgency to the insurgents, and invariably involve eliminating leaders and supporters who plan suicide bombings, destroying insurgents’ capabilities for mounting future attacks, and restrictions on mobility and other violations of civil liberties.

But there is mounting evidence that such harsh measures reinforce radical opposition and even intensify it. This is now happening in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories and has also been the case in Sri Lanka and Iraq and other conflict sites.