Acceso usuarios
Mia Bloom, John Saxe-Fernández
Suicide car bombs have become a commonplace and virtually daily event in conflicts such as those taking place in Iraq or Afghanistan.* When an attack occurs, we make assumptions about the intent and motivation of the driver and the organization that sent him (and increasingly, her). Often, such attacks in an Islamic context presume that the act is a deliberate Istishhadi (martyrdom) operation. This paper challenges the basic assumptions about how the concept of martyrdom has been constructed in the literature until now. Using the little-known case of the IRA’s proxy bomb campaign in Northern Ireland in 1990, we demonstrate how complex these operations are in reality
