Hard targets
Subtitle: theory and evidence on suicide attacks
By: Eli Berman, David D. Laitin.
Contributors: Laitin, David D.; National Bureau of Economic Research.
Series: NBER working paper paper series -- no. 11740.; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research) -- working paper no. 11740.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 39
Subjects: Suicide bombings -- Econometric models
Description: "Who chooses suicide attacks? Though rebels typically target poor countries, suicide attacks are just as likely to target rich democracies.  Though many groups have grievances, suicide attacks are favored by the radical religious.  Though rebels often kill coreligionists, they seldom use suicide attacks to do so.  We model the choice of tactics by rebels, bearing in mind that a successful suicide attack imposes the ultimate cost on the attacker and the organization.  We first ask what a suicide attacker would have to believe to be deemed rational.  We then embed the attacker and other operatives in a club good model which emphasizes the function of voluntary religious organizations as providers of benign local public goods.  The sacrifices which these groups demand solve a free-rider problem in the cooperative production of public goods.  These sacrifices make clubs well suited for organizing suicide attacks, a tactic in which defection by operatives (including the attacker) endangers the entire organization.  The model also analyzes the choice of suicide attacks as a tactic, predicting that suicide will be used when targets are well protected and when damage is great.  Those predictions are consistent with the patterns described above.  The model has testable implications for tactic choice of terrorists and for damage achieved by different types of terrorists, which we find to be consistent with the data"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: "November 2005."

Includes bibliographical references (p. 31-32).

Also available in PDF from the NBER world wide web site (www.nber.org).