Gruesome acts of terror — like the ones that unfolded in Brussels, Belgium on Monday, killing 28 people and injured dozens more — may appear random.
All we see is the aftermath — the bloodied bodies and the debris. We never see the motives, so we assume there's something particular about this attack that motivated these killers.
But decades of research suggest exactly the opposite, that since around 1980 just about every act of terrorism has stemmed from a similar frustration: foreign military involvement at home.
"What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not religion," Robert Pape, founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism at the University of Chicago, said recently on Politics and Reality Radio, "but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly."
Pape has spent nearly his entire career as a political scientist studying terrorism. He's analyzed more than 4,600 acts of suicidal terror around the world, which, by the best measure, is every act of suicidal terror around the world since 1980.
He's found that beneath fundamental religious beliefs is a more basic commitment to the ownership of land and property; terrorists protect what they believe is rightfully theirs.
Al Qaeda protected Afghanistan from Soviet forces three decades ago. Today, ISIS fights to preserve the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. As Joshua Holland reports in The Nation, nearly all of ISIS' higher-ranking officials once served in the Iraq military in a leadership role.
Pape's view is shared by other researchers.
The Suicide Terrorism Database, at Flinders University in Australia, maintains one of the largest catalogs of suicide attacks in the world. Riaz Hassan, a leading sociologist and expert in Islamic studies, helps run the database. His research has found political, not religious, motivation is at the heart of most attacks.
"Though religion can play a vital role in recruiting and motivating potential future suicide bombers," Hassan wrote in 2009, "the driving force is not religion but a cocktail of motivations including politics, humiliation, revenge, retaliation and altruism."
In order to surrender your physical existence with a vest made of dynamite, in other words, you must first believe what you're doing is wholly just. That's the altruism Hassan mentions. Further down is the anger and embarrassment, and a resentment toward foreign involvement.
"Suicide bombings are carried out by motivated individuals associated with community-based organizations," Hassan writes.
And that's no accident.
As both Hassan and Pape have found, when people feel their homeland is threatened to its very core, and a militant group has the means of getting rid of that threat, people will risk everything to protect what's theirs.
The problem in discussing these horrible acts is that political fervor runs too deep to notice in the immediate aftermath, and so religion gets caught in the crossfire.
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