Choosing to Die: Suicide Bombing and Suicide Protest in South Asia

Scholars tend to attribute the use of suicide protest and suicide bombing to purely rational considerations. In contrast, I argue that conventional understandings of strategy are too narrow and must be expanded to include emotional motivations for political mobilization. “Complex” strategy directly engages both the calculative and emotive understandings of political action. I develop this theory through a comparison of suicide protests and suicide bombings in South Asia, focusing on the emotional content of this extreme tactic. Suicide protests illustrate the importance of pride, sympathy, fear, and shame in political mobilization. I explore the emotional character of suicide in protest through an investigation of two cases: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka (LTTE) and the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) in India.