Assessing Social Support for Suicide Bombing

Thursday, April 10, 2008
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
(Pacific)
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Speaker: 
  • Giacomo Chiozza
Dr. Chiozza investigates the popular basis of support for suicide terrorism carried out against Americans and other Western targets in Iraq. Using survey data from six countries in the Middle East and South Asia, he investigates how demographic factors, such as gender, education, and age, interact with specific predispositions and attitudes, including fear of the United States, anti-Semitism, and personal anomie, to explain who would consider suicide terrorism against American and Western targets in Iraq justifiable. Methodologically, he employs Classification and Regression Tree (CART) models, a novel methodology that allows for a parsimonious identification of interactive and non-linear effects in the data. Dr. Chiozza shows that fear of the U.S. trumps other motivations in the countries that are geographically closer to Iraq.

Giacomo Chiozza (speaker) is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a PhD from Duke University and a BA from the Università degli Studi di Milano. Before joining the Berkeley Political Science department, he was a post-doctoral fellow in national security at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. His research interests include the study of foreign perceptions of the United States in the American World Order and the quantitative analysis of conflict processes. He is the author of "A Crisis like No Other? Anti-Americanism at the Time of the Iraq War" (European Journal of International Relations, forthcoming); "Disaggregating Anti-Americanism: An Analysis of Individual Attitudes Towards the United States" (In Keohane and Katzenstein, Anti-Americanisms in World Politics, 2007), as well as of articles on leaders and conflict processes that were published in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the Journal of Peace Research.

Aila Matanock (discussant) is a doctoral student in political science at Stanford.  She received an undergraduate degree magna cum laude in Social Studies from Harvard University, while working with the Belfer Center’s Managing the Atom Project and with the Los Alamos National Laboratory.  After graduation, she took a job at the RAND Corporation as a research assistant where she analyzed projects on terrorism and nuclear weapons.  Her current research is on social support for terrorism, the effect of nuclear weapons on conventional conflict, and the reasons for varying levels of shared sovereignty in international agreements.