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Dying To Win Summary

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Dying to Win by Robert A. Pape is written to understand the “why” that terrorists have for their actions and why the do it to the people they choose to attack. Pape gathers his data from a range of years between 1980 and 2003. There were numerous large terrorist attacks in these times including the attack of the World Trade Centers in the United States in 2001. This attack is widely known as one of the most devastating attacks in the history of terrorism. Robert Pape believes that suicide terrorism is motivated by the attempt to persuade democratic states into pulling out their military troops from the countries that the attackers inhabit. The involvement of the Islamic religion is not from Islam itself but the different interpretations people …show more content…

Suicide terrorism is often martyred instead of seen as a violent criminalistics thing to do. Pape explains that “although isolated incidents do occur, the overwhelming majority of suicide terrorist attacks take place as part of organized, coherent campaigns in which individual after individual, or team after team, voluntarily kill themselves as a means to kill the maximum number of people in the target society in order to compel that state to end a foreign occupation of their homeland” (80-81). After such terrible attacks, one would believe that these groups would be isolated and set apart from their society, but they actually rely on their society to keep them going. The support by the community helps replenish their members to keep going in their campaign (81). The community plays many other rolls, such as avoiding detection and keeping suicide terrorists in high standing opinion so that people will be driven to join the cause (81-82). Pape also discusses the importance of religion in the social logic of suicide terrorism. Religion is either a present factor or not a factor at all in terrorism but it never widens or narrows during the terrorism campaign (127). Lebanon, Punjab, Sri Lanka, and Turkey are all examples of suicidal terrorism campaign that are differently influenced by religion (128). Today Islamic terrorism is probably the most widely known form of terrorism in regards to religion. In these four cases, however, Islam is not evident in any of them. Christianity, Hinduism, Sunni, Buddhism, Judaism are all religions that were drivers of these attacks. Pape organized each case around three main issues. The first is the nature and extent of the foreign occupation. The second is the extent of community support for self-sacrifice to end the occupation. The final issue is how terrorist and other community leaders exploited the existence of a religious difference to mobilize

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