The current trend toward suicide bombings began in Lebanon in the early 1980s. The practice soon spread to civil conflicts in Sri Lanka, the Kurdish areas of Turkey, and Chechnya. Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians in the 1990s and during the Al Aqsa intifada further highlighted the threat. Al Qaeda's adoption of the tactic brought a transnational dimension. Interest in the phenomenon then surged after the shock of the 2001 attacks, which involved an unprecedented number of both perpetrators and casualties. Since then, suicide bombings have expanded in number and geographical range, reaching extraordinary levels in the Iraq War and spreading around the world to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, Kenya, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Bangladesh, and Britain.

This review covers thirteen of the books published on the subject since 2002. Three analyze the Palestinian case and four others focus on Islamist violence. The other six, including two edited collections, intend to be comprehensive. This review also refers to a few selected publications that discuss the arguments presented in the works reviewed. It aims to give readers a glimpse of the content of the different volumes as well as offer a critique.

The essay reviews these works:

• Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
• Joyce M. Davis, Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance and Despair in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
• Diego Gambetta, ed., Making Sense of Suicide Missions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Mohammed M. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs: The Making of Palestinian Suicide Bombers (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2006).
• Raphael Israeli, Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology (London: Frank Cass, 2003).
• Farhad Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers: Allah's New Martyrs, translated from the French by David Macey (London: Pluto Press, 2005).
• Anne Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs' Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).
• Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005).
• Ami Pedahzur, ed., Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism: The Globalization of Martyrdom (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
• Christoph Reuter, My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, translated from the German by Helena Ragg-Kirkby (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
• Shaul Shay, The Shahids: Islam and Suicide Attacks (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004).
• Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (Emmaus Pa.: Rodale [distributed by St. Martin's Press] 2003).

Some rebel groups abuse noncombatant populations, while others exhibit restraint. Insurgent leaders in some countries transform local structures of government, while others simply extract resources for their own benefit. In some contexts, groups kill their victims selectively, while in other environments violence appears indiscriminate, even random. This book presents a theory that accounts for the different strategies pursued by rebel groups in civil war, explaining why patterns of insurgent violence vary so much across conflicts. It does so by examining the membership, structure, and behavior of four insurgent movements in Uganda, Mozambique, and Peru. Drawing on interviews with nearly 200 combatants and civilians who experienced violence firsthand, it shows that rebels' strategies depend in important ways on how difficult it is to launch a rebellion. The book thus demonstrates how characteristics of the environment in which rebellions emerge constrain rebel organization and shape the patterns of violence that civilians experience.

ABSTRACT:

While the refugee protection system is one of international law's most recognizable features, it routinely places massive numbers of refugees in camps in the developing world, where they face chronic threats to their physical security from crime and disorder, physical coercion, and military attacks. Yet key actors responsible for refugee protection, including host states, advanced industrialized countries, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), have failed to prioritize refugee security.

This article asks: (1) Why? (2) What have been the consequences? and (3) What do these answers reveal about how organizations carry out legal mandates in complicated political environments?

Conventional wisdom holds that security only recently became a major problem in the refugee protection system; that UNHCR's role in enhancing refugees' physical security is limited by the agency's legal mandate and practical constraints; and that problems of violence and physical security are largely episodic concerns affecting small numbers in discrete refugee populations. Drawing on historical documents, interviews, data on budgets and performance measures, and legal doctrine, I show this conventional wisdom to be wrong. Only some of the problems associated with the current system can be explained by international geopolitics or by legal compromises reflected in refugee law.Instead, that system's brutal realities also reflect bureaucratic dynamics, political pressures, and legal interpretations shaping the discretionary choices of UNHCR and its nongovernmental organization partners. I develop the argument by tracing the remarkable history of UNHCR as it transformed itself from a refugee advocacy organization with a limited mandate into a modern relief agency.

This evolution helps explain the persistence of security problems and sheds light on the challenges of implementing ambitious legal mandates under uncertainty, particularly when the organizations doing so operate in complex political environments.

Today, the Senate Intelligence Committee will begin questioning Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, about the National Security Agency's collection of U.S. citizens' telephone records.

The scrutiny of the NSA is deserved, but the Senate and the American public may be missing a broader and more disturbing development. For the first time since the Civil War, the United States has been designated a military theater of operations. The Department of Defense -- which includes the NSA -- is focusing its vast resources on the homeland. And it is taking an unprecedented role in domestic spying.

It may be legal. But it circumvents three decades of efforts by Congress to restrict government surveillance of Americans under the guise of national security. And it represents a profound shift in the role of the military operating inside the United States. What's at stake here is the erosion of the principle, embedded in the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, that the U.S. military not be used for domestic law enforcement.

When the administration declared the United States to be a theater of military operations in 2002, it created a U.S. Northern Command, which set up intelligence centers in Colorado and Texas to analyze the domestic threat. But these are not the military's only domestic intelligence efforts. According to the Congressional Research Service, the Pentagon controls "a substantial portion" of U.S. national intelligence assets, the traditional turf of the FBI and CIA.

In 2003, Congress created the job of undersecretary of Defense for intelligence to oversee the department's many intelligence bodies -- including a new entity called Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA.

CIFA was ordered to maintain a "domestic law-enforcement database" on "potential terrorist threats" to U.S. military installations, and it began collecting information on U.S. citizens.

In 2005, a presidential commission suggested that CIFA, set up as a clearinghouse for information, be empowered to conduct domestic investigations into crimes such as treason, espionage and terrorism. Astoundingly, the commission declared that such an expansion of military powers would not require congressional approval; a presidential order and Pentagon directive would suffice. One Defense Department program feeding information to CIFA is TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice), which is supposed to obtain data from "concerned citizens and military members regarding suspicious incidents" that could herald terrorist attacks. But the military appears to have interpreted its mandate broadly. A TALON report was filed on a protest against "war profiteering" by Halliburton, Newsweek reported. The protesters alleged the defense contractor overcharged for food for U.S. troops in Iraq.

Counterintelligence reports were also filed on New York University's OUTlaw, a decades-old organization of openly gay law students. "The term 'outlaw' is a backhanded way of saying it's all right to commit possible violence," concluded one misguided military investigator in a document obtained last month under the Freedom of Information Act." NBC reported that about four dozen TALON database entries on "suspicious incidents" were not about terrorism but about opposition to the Iraq war and military recruiting.

These misguided military forays into domestic surveillance harken back to Vietnam War-era abuses. This time, they are the result of a much broader intelligence-gathering effort by the military on U.S. soil. President Bush said last week, "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans." But a 2004 survey by the General Accounting Office found 199 data-mining operations that collect information ranging from credit-card statements to medical records. The Defense Department had five programs on intelligence and counterterrorism.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, created in 1961 to provide foreign military intelligence, now uses "Verity K2" software to scan U.S. intelligence files and the Internet "to identify foreign terrorists or Americans connected to foreign terrorism activity," and "Inxight Smart Discovery" software to help identify patterns in databases. CIFA has reportedly contracted with Computer Sciences Corp. to buy identity-masking software, which could allow it to create fake websites and monitor legitimate U.S. sites without leaving clues that it had been there. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is collecting data from 133 U.S. cities; intelligence sources told the Los Angeles Times that, when collection is completed, the agency would be able to identify occupants in each house, their nationality and even their political affiliation.

In 2002, the Defense Department launched the granddaddy of all data-mining efforts, Total Information Awareness, to trawl through all government and commercial databases available worldwide. In 2003, concerned about privacy implications, Congress cut its funding. But many of the projects simply transferred to other Defense Department agencies. Two of the most important, the Information Awareness Prototype System and Genoa II, moved to NSA headquarters.

The Pentagon argues that its monitoring of U.S. citizens is legal. "Contrary to popular belief, there is no absolute ban on intelligence" agencies collecting information on Americans or disseminating it, says a memo by Robert Noonan, deputy chief of staff for intelligence. Military intelligence agents can receive any information "from anyone, any time," Noonan wrote.

Throughout U.S. history, we have struggled to balance security concerns with the protection of individual rights, and a thick body of law regulates domestic law enforcement agencies' behavior. Congress should think twice before it lets the behemoth Defense Department into domestic law enforcement.