Rubenstein's The New Global Terrorism, Pyscho-Political Sources Of Terrorism

Article Review: Rubenstein The chapter of The New Global Terrorism, Pyscho-Political Sources of Terrorism by Richard Rubenstein is a qualitative study that seeks to explain terrorist motivation using the attacks of The World Trade Center and Pentagon that took place in America on September 11, 2001. I found this article well written and interconnected to many conflict theories which I will explore in further detail throughout my review. In reference to my previous statement, this article is a qualitative study because it is seeking to understand a phenomenon using accounts of what happened rather than numbers to explain the study. The author made a good decision by using a qualitative approach for this study. I say this because when studying something as sensitive yet intricate as the 9/11 attacks. This is hard subject for many Americans and if the author would have used a quantitative approach utilizing numbers and statistics, I do not believe it would be as effective for the reader. I feel this way because it is easy for people to become outraged and overwhelmed by the number of people who lost their lives and that tends to distract the audience

Moreover, I found Rubenstein’s approach to understanding the motivation of terrorists interesting and very much interconnected to the previous article Religion and Support for Suicide Attacks by Gringes et al. Their quantitative study explains that suicide bombers are more likely to commit an attack if they are heavily involved with their religious congregations rather than being involved spiritually and true to the key principles of that specific religion. This can be perceived an expressive action which is what Rubenstein associates the devastating 9/11 attacks with. He explains that the attacks were more expressive in nature instead of being