Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, 5828 South University
 Avenue, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637 (r-pape@uchicago.edu).

 Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but the most common explanations do not
 help us understand why. Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in
 suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a
 Marxist/Leninist ideology, while existing psychological explanations have been
 contradicted by the widening range of socio-economic backgrounds of suicide terrorists.
 To advance our understanding of this growing phenomenon, this study collects the
 universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide from 1980 to 2001, 188 in all. In contrast
 to the existing explanations, this study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic
 logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant
 territorial concessions. Moreover, over the past two decades, suicide terrorism has been
 rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays. Suicide terrorists sought to
 compel American and French military forces to abandon Lebanon in 1983, Israeli forces
 to leave Lebanon in 1985, Israeli forces to quit the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in
 1994 and 1995, the Sri Lankan government to create an independent Tamil state from
 1990 on, and the Turkish government to grant autonomy to the Kurds in the late 1990s.
 In all but the case of Turkey, the terrorist political cause made more gains after the
 resort to suicide operations than it had before. Thus, Western democracies should
 pursue policies that teach terrorists that the lesson of the 1980s and 1990s no longer
 holds, policies which in practice may have more to do with improving homeland security
 than with offensive military action.