The Market for Martyrs

Abstract

Injury-oriented sacrifice is a market phenomenon grounded in exchanges between a relatively small supply of “martyrs” and a relatively large number of “demanders” who benefit from the martyrs’ acts. Contrary to popular perception, it is because of limited demand rather than limited supply that such markets rarely flourish. Suicidal attacks almost never profit the groups best equipped to recruit, train, and direct the potential killers. Once established, however, the markets are hard to shut down from the supply side –because so few “martyrs” are required and because terrorist “firms” can readily substitute across different methods and recruits. On the other hand, relatively small changes in the political and economic environment can combine to undermine the market’s demand side. The Market for Martyrs Laurence R. Iannaccone George Mason University The horrific attacks of September 11, 2001 left scholars, journalists, and the general public struggling to make sense of suicide terrorism. As subsequent research has shown, the seemingly obvious explanations miss the mark. Contrary to the initial claims of pundits and politicians, the typical suicide bomber is neither poor nor ignorant; he has no history of mental illness or attempted suicide; he is not especially aggressive or desperate; and he has no special reason to hate his victims. Exceptional rates of poverty, ignorance, grievance, oppression, or hatred likewise fail to predict when and where the attacks originate. Social scientists have drawn upon many methods and disciplines to better understand this most deadly way of dying. But in most of this work, religion receives surprisingly little attention relative to that which is given to poverty, politics, conflict, indoctrination, history, and psychology. As I see it, the tendency to downplay religion is both inefficient and misleading. Over the past two generations, social scientists have learned a great deal about religious extremism. From hundreds of case studies and scores of surveys, sociologists have amassed numerous empirical generalizations about so-called “cults,” “sects,” and “fundamentalisms.” More recently, economists have developed theories that explain these findings in terms of rational choice, collective production, and market structure. Together, these two bodies of research have much to tell us about suicide bombing and related forms of militancy. Thus, my first challenge is to link the lessons of generic religious extremism to the exceptional case of violent extremism. The link is far from obvious; for despite the prevalence of extremism in all religious traditions the vast majority of extremists do no harm and often much good. Religious extremism typically manifests itself in distinctive dress and grooming, restrictive diet, voluntary poverty, ceaseless worship, communal living, rigorous chastity, liberal charity, and aggressive proselytizing. Such behavior may strike outsiders as bizarre and irritating, or even fanatical and illegal, but rarely does it involve violence, much less murder. As we shall see, however, extremist groups of all kinds display similar attributes, experience similar problems, and adopt similar strategies. My second challenge is to embed the sociological insights regarding extremism and extremist groups within a “market for martyrs” – an economic framework that helps us understand why (and when and where) violent extremism develops, how it is sustained, why it has proved difficult to defeat, and why it arises so rarely. Although this market operates in accordance with standard economic principles, it bears limited resemblance to most previously-explored economic models of crime, suicide, hatred, war, terrorism, or commercial activity.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 102 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.