ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of suicide bombing has become a practice that has spread across the planet, to be deployed in very different kinds of conflicts from the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka to the almost daily attack on occupation forces in Iraq.1 Social theories have generally been framed within the classical terms of a secular rationalism that has tended to assume that industrialisation would be accompanied by secularisation, though it was understood that this would generally be an uneven process around the world. But the return of religion as a major social force has challenged these deeply held assumptions that have so often guided social analysis of the contemporary world. Often this has meant that religious motivation has been interpreted as a regression to earlier, even medieval ways of thinking, largely dependent on faith. The idea that, with modernity, faith would be replaced by reason has needed to be challenged if we are to grasp that suicide bombings have become very much a feature of contemporary conflicts within a postmodern world.
