ABSTRACT
Numerous studies of the terrorist personality have been published, but their conclusions are extremely divergent. They can be divided into two broad categories, pathologizing and non-pathologizing. The psychological profile of the suicide terrorist that emerges from the earlier contribution of Merari and from Post’s 1990 paper is of a socially isolated individual and probably suffering from a mental abnormality. Merari suggests that the cultural environment and religious context are irrelevant to the choice of suicide terrorism, and that the motivation in this case is no different from that of someone who takes his own life for personal reasons. A conspicuous difference between the Tamil Tigers and Islamic guerrillas was that the proportion of female suicide terrorists in the former group, at some sixty per cent, was higher than that of their male counterparts. The testimony of Nasra Hassan confirms that those intending to become suicide terrorists are apparently normal individuals.
