Fear of Suicide Terrorism: Consequences for Individuals and Politics

Suicide terrorism, although not new, increased over the last decade in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrorist organizations primarily use suicide attacks as a form of psychological warfare to create fear and chaos as a means of achieving a political goal. Suicide attacks often cause an intense combination of personal fear for one’s life and shared national fear for the security of the country. The current paper describes a theoretical model based on the PSI-theory (Dörner, 1999)that connects individuals’ fear of suicide attacks to political attitudes. The paper describes how politicians react to these individual psychological processes related to fear of suicide terrorism, using examples from the Hamid Karzai administration in Afghanistan and the Nouri al-Maliki administration in Iraq. Thus the paper attempts to connect psychological motivational, emotional, and cognitive processes on the level of the individual to the politics of the war on terror.