What is the meaning of dead and dying bodies? Political Self-Sacrifice explores individual acts of martyrdom—including self-immolation, hunger strikes, and suicide terrorism—with a sophisticated interpretive approach to world politics. This is an impressive work that grapples with many important issues in world politics: the role of religion in constituting political meaning, the role of global media in communicating meanings and emotions, the ability of individual action to have systemic effects, and the role of “martyrdom” narratives in challenging the legitimacy of political elites.
K. M. Fierke analyzes the discursive debate over whether to call an act of political self-sacrifice “suicide” or “martyrdom.” Suicide is an individual act that violates a social code—it is irrational, sinful, criminal, or selfish. Suicide fits the sovereign narrative and isolates the individual from the community. Martyrdom is a social act that speaks a truth or criticizes an injustice; it challenges the sovereign narrative and binds that individual within a marginalized community. When understood as martyrdom, acts of political self-sacrifice constitute resistance against forms of sovereign authority.
Fierke relies on a variety of interpretive approaches, including Ludwig Wittgenstein’s arguments about “forms of life” and “language games”; John Austin’s arguments about speech acts; Erving Goffman’s arguments about symbolic communication; and Michel Foucault’s arguments about the ways in which power shapes and disciplines the body. The concept of political self-sacrifice is contextualized with a discussion of religious rituals and ancient practices of sacrifice and martyrdom, tracing discursive battles over whether someone is a criminal or a martyr to the days of early Christianity. The role of religion in constituting the meaning of political self-sacrifice is one of the many interesting themes of the book. Going well beyond the obvious example of certain forms of Islam and suicide terrorism, Fierke also shows how Christian and Buddhist traditions help shape the meaning of dead and dying bodies.
The author both repudiates and appropriates the rational choice literature. After showing how game-theoretic approaches cannot account for the rationality of political self-sacrifice, she utilizes a more interpretive approach to games, tweaks the familiar prisoner’s dilemma game, and introduces the “warden’s dilemma.” When faced with resistance (e.g., a hunger strike), a warden can either continue the punishment or engage in dialogue in an attempt to change the rules of the game. If the warden continues the punishment and the hunger strikers die, then the discursive outcome of the game is either to win by successfully branding the resisters as “criminals” or to lose by creating space for the discursive creation of “martyrs.” The key to the outcome of the game is whether the larger community blames the warden or the prisoners for the deaths. Who, ultimately, is the criminal?
Fierke argues that the visual image of a suffering body can enable altered understandings of political space. Such images evoke emotions that circulate and influence the “body politic.” These emotions are “sticky” when connected to historical memory and social norms: “The self-sacrifice of the individual body becomes an expression of the loss of collective sovereignty, which materializes the injustice experienced by the community and thereby creates the conditions for its restoration” (p. 79). The author calls these alternative discourses “anti-structure,” and the struggle of the dominant structure versus anti-structure defines the meaning of political self-sacrifice. Anti-structure has power by translating the experience of humiliation into a form of power in which the sacrificed body represents the community and its potential restoration.
Four case studies effectively illustrate these arguments. The first is the Northern Ireland hunger strikes in the early 1980s. Jailed Republican prisoners used hunger strikes to protest their treatment as common criminals. They created an anti-structure narrative: They were prisoners of war, not common criminals; they were in a concentration camp, not a prison; they were martyrs, and Margaret Thatcher was the criminal. They situated their resistance within Christian metaphors (Jesus was also a prisoner of conscience) and the history of republican struggle. The Thatcher government was unwilling to bend—until one of the hunger strikers won a seat in Parliament, and the hunger strikes became worldwide news. When that member died, there were protests across Europe and the United States. To avoid “losing” the discursive warden’s dilemma, the UK eventually recognized Sinn Fein as a nonmilitary, political wing of the Irish Republican Army and began negotiations.
The second case is the assassination of Father Jerzy Popieluszko during the Polish Solidarity movement. The Polish government considered Popieluszko its biggest threat, and security forces kidnapped and killed the priest. This act catalyzed an anti-structure informed by Polish nationalism and Christian symbolism. Solidarity remained nonviolent due to this anti-structure framing (Christian) suffering as part of (Polish) resistance. Pope John Paul II explicitly provided the theological infrastructure: Death through martyrdom was a living victory, like that of Christ. Polish suffering and the martyrdom of Popieluszko not only would lead to the resurrection of an independent Poland but would also have redemptive value for the whole world. The martyr narrative was instantly powerful, and the Polish regime publicly put the security officers on trial—a rare event within the Soviet bloc. The event created the political space for a strengthened Solidarity movement that helped facilitate the end of communist rule in Poland.
The third case is the self-immolation by Buddhist monks to protest the Vietnam War. Self-immolation in the face of foreign invasion has a long history within Buddhism and is not considered suicide if it is an offering and sacrifice to Buddha. In these cases, the monks were an offering on behalf of the Vietnamese people. Buddhism was an important part of the political culture as most felt repressed by the Catholic regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. The first self-immolation occurred in June 1964, and the photo of Thich Quang Duc quickly became an iconic image of the war. As other monks (and nine Americans) followed suit, massive demonstrations broke out in Saigon, and the United States pressured Diem to compromise with the Buddhists. He instead raided a Saigon temple that was at the heart of the Buddhist movement and arrested 400 people. The United States then conspired to remove Diem and—ironically for the Buddhist movement—increased its involvement in Vietnam with the regime that followed.
These examples effectively illustrated the argument so well that the final case study chapter—on suicide terrorism and the self-immolation in Tunisia that triggered the Arab Spring—seemed anticlimactic. The obvious common theme throughout the cases was the role of religion in constituting “martyrdom,” and the importance of this work stems from illustrating the common discursive dynamics across the cases.
I was left wondering whether these dynamics are generalizable beyond such extreme cases of self-sacrifice within religious frameworks. Would we find similar patterns in discourse regarding less intentional self-sacrifice in more secular contexts—whistleblowers, protesters, dissidents, and so on? Does the warden’s dilemma apply to many other situations? Or is the emotive shock of dead and dying bodies a relatively unique path to the construction of powerful alternative discourses? Either way, this is an excellent example of a thoroughly interpretive approach that can offer valuable insights into world politics.
