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Purpose The phenomenon of murder-suicide (aka. homicide-suicide) makes a sizeable impact on current public perceptions and policies regarding mental illness and risk for violence. However, within the past 25 years, our understanding of murder-suicide has remained relatively stable, and so has our relative inability to reliably predict and prevent it. The purpose of this paper is to propose pathways for furthering a cogent understanding of murder-suicide that may inform specific predictive and preventative practices. Design/methodology/approach Research literature regarding empirical and theoretical positions in the fields of murder-suicide, homicide, and suicide are reviewed and discussed. Findings While murder-suicide has many similarities to both homicide and suicide, no current theories of either alone have been successful in fully incorporating the phenomenon of murder-suicide. Theories specific to murder-suicide as a unique form of violence are in need of further research. Originality/value Developing and empirically testing theories of murder-suicide may lead to a vast and needed improvement of our understanding, prediction, and prevention of these tragedies.

The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats presents the updated and expanded Database on Suicide Attacks (DSAT), which now links to Uppsala Conflict Data Program data on armed conflicts and includes a new dataset measuring the alliance and rivalry relationships among militant groups with connections to suicide attack groups. We assess global trends in suicide attacks over four decades, and demonstrate the value of the expanded DSAT with special attention to the growing diffusion of suicide attacks in armed conflicts and the large role of networks established by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State through 2019 in this diffusion. Overall, the expanded DSAT demonstrates the advantages of integration across datasets of political violence for expanding research on important outcomes, generating new knowledge about the spread of particularly deadly forms of political violence, and raising important new questions about the efficacy of current policies to curb their spread.

Suicide attacks continue to plague a multitude of conflict zones. However, the scholarly literature on the phenomenon has yet to produce a theory that explains why militant organizations at different stages of development, facing dissimilar enemies, and situated in unique conflict environments adopt suicide attacks. Moreover, the suicide-attack phenomenon now presents an intriguing puzzle. While most militant organizations fail to achieve their core political ends or 'outcome goals', organizations that employ suicide attacks are even less likely to succeed. Still, organizations have adopted suicide attacks at increasing rates. Given their ineffectiveness in precipitating outcome-goal success, why do organizations continue to adopt suicide attacks? Like all organizations, militant organizations share two common aims: (1) to survive and (2) to achieve outcome goals. As martyrdom operations often fulfill the ideological or cultural expectations of certain identity groups, representative organizations may adopt suicide attacks to expand constituent support or enhance status within a particular political landscape. Further, organizations can conduct suicide attacks to signal ideological solidarity with fellow militant organizations. This article analyzes an original large-N dataset of militant organizations alongside an original database of over 5,000 suicide attacks, and evaluates numerous case examples. The results demonstrate that militant organizations across regions and over time have adopted suicide attacks in order to gain supporters, promote organizational longevity, and boost or preserve status.

Terror aims to disrupt peace and security of countries. Suicide attacks, a form of terrorism is carried out in many parts of the world today. These attacks aiming at destroying countries and citizens, and targeting civilians or state institutions, have been the current agenda in Turkey with cases such as Suruc Attack and Ankara Railway Station Attack following the June 7, 2015, elections and the Syrian Civil War. These attacks, which deeply affect the citizens and harm the country, can also have an impacton political behaviors such as social practices. Individuals, as voters, may vote under the influence of political and social events. In this study, effects of suicide attacks in Turkey on voting behavior were demonstrated by means of a reception analysis on the example of the Ankara Train Station Attack (October 10, 2015). In this way, how suicide attacks in Turkey reflected on voting behavior concerning the November 1, 2015, Early Elections was analyzed. The ethnographic method was used in the study. As the conclusion of the study,the individuals were observed to be aware of the fact that the real purpose of terrorism was to scare and harm. The participants supported the government in case of the suicide attacks and other terrorist attacks. The majority of the participants believed thatthe suicide attack, whichtook place in the train station intersection in Ankara,would have no effect on the behaviors of the voters for the Early Elections of November 1, 2015.

From 2016 to 2021, women attempted to or perpetrated suicide attacks in Indonesia. These attacks were committed by them as individuals or in family units, who were affiliated to the Islamic State. These incidents marked the first occurrence of suicide attacks carried out by women in Indonesia. Current scholarship and policy analysis of female terrorism attributed to the Islamic State or proxy groups is still catching up with the implications of trends emerging from women’s actions as suicide attackers in Indonesia and worldwide. Primarily, scholarly and policy analyses of female terrorism focus on the individual woman engaged in violence, whereas women who support terrorist groups—as ideologues, wives, and online activists—are given a secondary analytical focus. This creates conceptual limitations in understanding women’s pathways to violence, which can encompass violent and supportive roles within the social world in which they operate. Using Indonesia as a case study, this article advances a framework to account for the mobilisation of different identities to commit violence across personal and political linkages. In examining historical and current developments in Indonesia, this article illustrates that women as supporters or actors of violence, while largely conforming to traditional gender ideology and roles, are driven by both personal and political considerations.

How do terrorist groups control their members? Do the tools groups use to monitor their operatives and enforce discipline create security vulnerabilities that governments can exploit?The Terrorist's Dilemmais the first book to systematically examine the great variation in how terrorist groups are structured. Employing a broad range of agency theory, historical case studies, and terrorists' own internal documents, Jacob Shapiro provocatively discusses the core managerial challenges that terrorists face and illustrates how their political goals interact with the operational environment to push them to organize in particular ways. Shapiro provides a historically informed explanation for why some groups have little hierarchy, while others resemble miniature firms, complete with line charts and written disciplinary codes. Looking at groups in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, he highlights how consistent and widespread the terrorist's dilemma--balancing the desire to maintain control with the need for secrecy--has been since the 1880s. Through an analysis of more than a hundred terrorist autobiographies he shows how prevalent bureaucracy has been, and he utilizes a cache of internal documents from al-Qa'ida in Iraq to outline why this deadly group used so much paperwork to handle its people. Tracing the strategic interaction between terrorist leaders and their operatives, Shapiro closes with a series of comparative case studies, indicating that the differences in how groups in the same conflict approach their dilemmas are consistent with an agency theory perspective. The Terrorist's Dilemmademonstrates the management constraints inherent to terrorist groups and sheds light on specific organizational details that can be exploited to more efficiently combat terrorist activity.

The phenomenon of suicide attacks has dramatically expanded over the last twenty years, rising from no events in 1980 to a total of 1,398 events by 2008. A prominent theory has argued that suicide attacks are a coercive strategy aimed at ending foreign military occupation by democracies. Yet these conclusions are based on a research design that is affected by selection bias and that fails to distinguish foreign occupations from cases of groups seeking independence or autonomy, which we term domestic occupations. Analyzing an original data set that distinguishes the different types of occupation, we find that only foreign occupations have a strong and consistent effect on the incidence of suicide attacks. The reason, we argue, is that suicide attacks only become cost effective when targets are both hardened and accessible, a strategic environment that is more common to civil wars and foreign occupations than to domestic occupations.

In an age when the Western world is preoccupied with worries about weapons of mass destruction in terrorist hands, terrorists across many parts of the globe are using a more basic device as a weapon - life itself. Suicide bombing has become a weapon of choice among terrorist groups because of its lethality and unrivalled ability to cause mayhem and fear, but what is the real driving force behind these attacks? For the first time, Suicide Bombings analyzes concrete data from The Suicide Terrorism Database at Flinders University, Australia, to explain what motivates the perpetrators. The results serve to largely discredit common wisdom that religion and an impressionable personality are the principal causes, and show rather that a cocktail of motivations fuel these attacks which include politics, humiliation, revenge, retaliation, and altruism. Suicide Bombings provides a short but incisive insight into this much publicized form of terrorism, and as such is an informative and engaging resource for students, academics, and indeed anyone with an interest in this topic.

The Diffusion of Military Power examines how the financial and organizational challenges of adopting new methods of fighting wars can influence the international balance of power. Michael Horowitz argues that a state or actor wishing to adopt a military innovation must possess both the financial resources to buy or build the technology and the internal organizational capacity to accommodate any necessary changes in recruiting, training, or operations. How countries react to new innovations--and to other actors that do or don't adopt them--has profound implications for the global order and the likelihood of war.

A wealth of research in recent decades has seen the economic approach to human behavior extended over many areas previously considered to belong to sociology, political science, law, and other fields. Research has also shown that economics can provide insight into many aspects of sports, including soccer.Beautiful Game Theoryis the first book that uses soccer to test economic theories and document novel human behavior. In this brilliant and entertaining book, Ignacio Palacios-Huerta illuminates economics through the world's most popular sport. He offers unique and often startling insights into game theory and microeconomics, covering topics such as mixed strategies, discrimination, incentives, and human preferences. He also looks at finance, experimental economics, behavioral economics, and neuroeconomics. Soccer provides rich data sets and environments that shed light on universal economic principles in interesting and useful ways. Essential reading for students, researchers, and sports enthusiasts,Beautiful Game Theory is the first book to showwhat soccer can do for economics.