Chapter 7 of The Myth of Martyrdom (Lankford Reference Lankford2013c) proposes four types of suicide terrorist: conventional, coerced, escapist, and indirect. Lankford's evidence for this is inductive and anecdotal, or perhaps, in contemporary terminology, “qualitative.” I would not personally wish to base my professional expertise on such modestly demonstrated (albeit confidently presented) views without stronger statistical evidence, and using such a model proactively and prematurely to screen for risk would surely breach Daubert criteria regarding evidence-based practice. Issues such as false positives (and false negatives) and how they affect the individuals so screened are lightly touched on, but insufficiently so, given the importance of ethics and human rights in the area (Saetnan Reference Saetnan2007). That said, antisocial behaviour is maintained by cognitions as well as dispositions (Egan Reference Egan, Furnham, von Stumm and Petredies2011; Egan et al. Reference Egan, McMurran, Richardson and Blair2000), and while offenders often believe their unchallenged personal myths and self-serving rhetoric, practitioners need to see through these distractions. Moreover, the imaginations of offenders and the personality disordered may be populated by an interest in violence and the bizarre (Egan et al. Reference Egan, Austin, Elliot, Patel and Charlesworth2003), and Lankford's book makes this violent ideation all too apparent. However, while disposition, interests, and cognitive constructs may correlate with antisocial behaviour, they remain insufficient to specifically identify future risk, and even the most strongly-researched risk-assessment instruments do not predict violence beyond 0.8 (Yang et al. Reference Yang, Wong and Coid2010).
Nevertheless, the author's approach is creative, broad, and refreshing. Lankford notes that workplace and rampage shootings (and subsequent suicides) are far more common than suicide-bombings, and that for such nihilists death is preferable to life. The rhetoric of suicide-terrorists being like elite military squads willing to give their lives for their country is rightly challenged, as one seeks to keep one's skilled, expensively-trained military operatives alive, and conventional military endeavour is to minimise casualties (including those to the enemy). Distressed persons who decide they have nothing to lose but their lives may be more expendable, at least to the cynics who seek to exploit their distress for a violent purpose.
Another welcome corrective to received wisdom is Lankford's presentation of evidence that kamikaze pilots were not inherently willing to die: candidates were brutalised until they regarded death as an attractive escape (Ohnuki-Tierney Reference Ohnuki-Tierney2007). Such brutalising also occurs in some madrassas, differentially victimising those lacking resilience or unable to acquire desired competencies, making suicidal death (re-construed as “martyrdom”) a release for some of those unable to cope. The processes by which the spirit of another person is broken are straightforward, should one have the psychopathy to do so, and similar methods are also used by some pimps to “condition” prostitutes (Kennedy et al. Reference Kennedy, Klein, Bristowe, Cooper and Yuille2007). Victimised persons develop learned helplessness, and become submissive, compliant, and inclined to dissociate. Individuals can do many things they would not do otherwise in such a mental state, as those recruiting suicide-bombers probably well know.
After the 2004 Madrid bombings (which killed 191, and wounded 1,800) Al-Qaeda released a document declaring “You love life and we love death,” and Lankford also challenges the nihilistic glorification of self-destruction. He notes that many “sacrificial” gestures are futile, and more like “escapist suicides.” To call such an act “brave” grossly and consciously misrepresents the nature of courage (a matter covered in Chapter 5). “Suicide by cop” is another form of escapist-suicide, which, to this reader, provides strong grounds to avoid using lethal force with a potential target when possible, as homicidal miscreants are better punished by consciously living with the consequences and reminders of their actions for the longest period possible.
Lankford notes that faced with the consequences of their actions, surviving offenders may lack the mental resources to comprehend the enormity of their offences, and their experience of painful but salutary feelings may lead to their contemplating or committing suicide. He also makes the crucial point that antisocial and violent acts are driven more by audacity than any virtue, because if you do not care about being caught or the consequences (e.g., if you seek to escape consequences by suicide or suicide by proxy), there are few limits on your behaviour. This reiterates the argument for, where possible, the use of non-lethal force in the containment of killers. We learn far more about rampage killers such as Anders Breivik, James Holmes, Fort Hood massacre initiator Nidal Hasan, or surviving Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, by keeping them alive and by not becoming complicit with opposing homicidal cults and subcultures by being homicidal ourselves. We also maintain moral authority despite the temptation to be as bad as the offender.
Appendix C of the book sets out four categories of suicide terrorist by their type, warning signs, level of training and experience, attack style, strategies for negotiation to facilitate surrender and arrest, and, strategies for interrogation. Content in the cells of the table often generalises across suicide categories; conventional and coerced suicide terrorists have psychopathologies associated with mental disorder, whereas escapist and indirect suicide terrorists fetishise death, and may well have more antisocial dispositions. This marries well with information extracted in an analysis of constructs used by British border controls to identify persons vulnerable to violent extremism (Egan et al., under review). I think it very likely that suicide terrorists can move across categories at different points in their violent extremist trajectories, but such flexibility and continuum thinking is not built into Lankford's model.
While a priori inductive models such as Lankford's appear comprehensive, they are often premature and insufficiently tested. Lankford rightly challenges received wisdom regarding the mental stability of suicide terrorists, spurious myths of martyrdom, and rampage killings that play on Western and cinematic notions of nihilism. But there is insufficient testing of his hypotheses. A small space analysis of individuals in his appendices A and B classified as having the attributes in his appendix C present or absent would soon test whether the four categories of suicide terrorist he identifies exist in the theoretical sense proposed. If not, it would define the structure of these important attributes for a revised and more conservative model of self-destructive killers more in keeping with reality.
Chapter 7 of The Myth of Martyrdom (Lankford Reference Lankford2013c) proposes four types of suicide terrorist: conventional, coerced, escapist, and indirect. Lankford's evidence for this is inductive and anecdotal, or perhaps, in contemporary terminology, “qualitative.” I would not personally wish to base my professional expertise on such modestly demonstrated (albeit confidently presented) views without stronger statistical evidence, and using such a model proactively and prematurely to screen for risk would surely breach Daubert criteria regarding evidence-based practice. Issues such as false positives (and false negatives) and how they affect the individuals so screened are lightly touched on, but insufficiently so, given the importance of ethics and human rights in the area (Saetnan Reference Saetnan2007). That said, antisocial behaviour is maintained by cognitions as well as dispositions (Egan Reference Egan, Furnham, von Stumm and Petredies2011; Egan et al. Reference Egan, McMurran, Richardson and Blair2000), and while offenders often believe their unchallenged personal myths and self-serving rhetoric, practitioners need to see through these distractions. Moreover, the imaginations of offenders and the personality disordered may be populated by an interest in violence and the bizarre (Egan et al. Reference Egan, Austin, Elliot, Patel and Charlesworth2003), and Lankford's book makes this violent ideation all too apparent. However, while disposition, interests, and cognitive constructs may correlate with antisocial behaviour, they remain insufficient to specifically identify future risk, and even the most strongly-researched risk-assessment instruments do not predict violence beyond 0.8 (Yang et al. Reference Yang, Wong and Coid2010).
Nevertheless, the author's approach is creative, broad, and refreshing. Lankford notes that workplace and rampage shootings (and subsequent suicides) are far more common than suicide-bombings, and that for such nihilists death is preferable to life. The rhetoric of suicide-terrorists being like elite military squads willing to give their lives for their country is rightly challenged, as one seeks to keep one's skilled, expensively-trained military operatives alive, and conventional military endeavour is to minimise casualties (including those to the enemy). Distressed persons who decide they have nothing to lose but their lives may be more expendable, at least to the cynics who seek to exploit their distress for a violent purpose.
Another welcome corrective to received wisdom is Lankford's presentation of evidence that kamikaze pilots were not inherently willing to die: candidates were brutalised until they regarded death as an attractive escape (Ohnuki-Tierney Reference Ohnuki-Tierney2007). Such brutalising also occurs in some madrassas, differentially victimising those lacking resilience or unable to acquire desired competencies, making suicidal death (re-construed as “martyrdom”) a release for some of those unable to cope. The processes by which the spirit of another person is broken are straightforward, should one have the psychopathy to do so, and similar methods are also used by some pimps to “condition” prostitutes (Kennedy et al. Reference Kennedy, Klein, Bristowe, Cooper and Yuille2007). Victimised persons develop learned helplessness, and become submissive, compliant, and inclined to dissociate. Individuals can do many things they would not do otherwise in such a mental state, as those recruiting suicide-bombers probably well know.
After the 2004 Madrid bombings (which killed 191, and wounded 1,800) Al-Qaeda released a document declaring “You love life and we love death,” and Lankford also challenges the nihilistic glorification of self-destruction. He notes that many “sacrificial” gestures are futile, and more like “escapist suicides.” To call such an act “brave” grossly and consciously misrepresents the nature of courage (a matter covered in Chapter 5). “Suicide by cop” is another form of escapist-suicide, which, to this reader, provides strong grounds to avoid using lethal force with a potential target when possible, as homicidal miscreants are better punished by consciously living with the consequences and reminders of their actions for the longest period possible.
Lankford notes that faced with the consequences of their actions, surviving offenders may lack the mental resources to comprehend the enormity of their offences, and their experience of painful but salutary feelings may lead to their contemplating or committing suicide. He also makes the crucial point that antisocial and violent acts are driven more by audacity than any virtue, because if you do not care about being caught or the consequences (e.g., if you seek to escape consequences by suicide or suicide by proxy), there are few limits on your behaviour. This reiterates the argument for, where possible, the use of non-lethal force in the containment of killers. We learn far more about rampage killers such as Anders Breivik, James Holmes, Fort Hood massacre initiator Nidal Hasan, or surviving Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, by keeping them alive and by not becoming complicit with opposing homicidal cults and subcultures by being homicidal ourselves. We also maintain moral authority despite the temptation to be as bad as the offender.
Appendix C of the book sets out four categories of suicide terrorist by their type, warning signs, level of training and experience, attack style, strategies for negotiation to facilitate surrender and arrest, and, strategies for interrogation. Content in the cells of the table often generalises across suicide categories; conventional and coerced suicide terrorists have psychopathologies associated with mental disorder, whereas escapist and indirect suicide terrorists fetishise death, and may well have more antisocial dispositions. This marries well with information extracted in an analysis of constructs used by British border controls to identify persons vulnerable to violent extremism (Egan et al., under review). I think it very likely that suicide terrorists can move across categories at different points in their violent extremist trajectories, but such flexibility and continuum thinking is not built into Lankford's model.
While a priori inductive models such as Lankford's appear comprehensive, they are often premature and insufficiently tested. Lankford rightly challenges received wisdom regarding the mental stability of suicide terrorists, spurious myths of martyrdom, and rampage killings that play on Western and cinematic notions of nihilism. But there is insufficient testing of his hypotheses. A small space analysis of individuals in his appendices A and B classified as having the attributes in his appendix C present or absent would soon test whether the four categories of suicide terrorist he identifies exist in the theoretical sense proposed. If not, it would define the structure of these important attributes for a revised and more conservative model of self-destructive killers more in keeping with reality.