Motives of Suicide Terrorism

The aim of the master thesis is to identify factors on which a motivation of individual, rather terrorist organization is based for committing of suicide attacks as a social phenomenon, that appears to be a priori incomprehensible in the context of European culture setting. The secondary aim of the thesis is to distinguish an eventual difference of motivation between female suicide attackers and male suicide attackers. For these purposes, two terrorist organizations have been analysed within two separately designed case studies, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and Hamas for those the suicide attacks have represented the real "modus operandi" and simultaneously engaged women to their suicide missions. These terrorist organizations have been systematically analysed in terms of cultural, political, economic and organizational and social-psychological factors. The levels of analysis used, represent a synthetized reflection of existing theoretic treatment of suicide terrorism issue. The resulting findings confirm, first of all, the fact, that suicide terrorism phenomenon constitutes considerably complicated social phenomenon, whose central motive appears to be political, more precisely nationalistic. However its strength and effectiveness are largely interconnected with other motives, both cultural,..