Of Lion Hearts, Terrible Wolves and Sacrificial Lambs: A Comparative Analysis of the Rationale and Conditions for Suicide Attacks in Japan during WWII and Iraq Post-2003
Berry, Robert C
2012
- Submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree of Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Suicide attacks are a defining feature of 21st Century political violence and a signature of modern terrorism. Often, the cause of the phenomenon is written off as religious fervor or extremism, which proves to be extremely poor analysis. Indeed, in order to curb the ... read moreusage of suicide attacks it is critical that they are understood beyond this conventional 'wisdom,' which inhibits critical thinking and detracts from the conversation. This work is a comparative analysis of two vastly different case studies that yet have two of the highest instances of suicide attacks in history: The Japanese kamikaze toward the end of the Pacific War and Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) in the Iraq War. After thoroughly debunking the overly simplistic argument that religious extremism causes suicide attacks, and the 'us versus them' worldview it stems from, this work uses primary and secondary source literature to bolster the argument that suicide attacks occur at a crossroads where (1) organizational strategy requires such an attack (due to a dynamic of asymmetric war) and (2) willing individuals to carry out such an attack meet, both of which are furthermore arrived at via (a) a moral persuasion to assert an identity specifically influenced by a 'culture of death,' as well as (b) a sense of crisis at the level of an existential threat, whether real or perceived. A 'culture of death,' moreover, is shown to be a culture that attaches an intrinsic moral value to an altruistic, voluntary death that is connected to basic identities an individual has, including gender and national identity. This work is at once part political science hypothesis and part comparative literature project. It serves as the beginning of a much larger endeavor to compare instances of suicide attacks through history with the hope of truly understanding them.read less
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