While rather rare before the 1980s, the use of suicide terrorism steadily rose into the early 2000s, leading to increased attempts by political scientists to explain the rise in popularity. In his 2003 article “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” published in The American Political Science Review, Robert A. Pape attempts to explain how, contrary to other explanations, the rise of suicide terrorism was due to its strategic effectiveness and not rising fanaticism or religious extremism. Pape uses a combination of realism and liberalism to explain the rise of suicide terrorism as one caused by its usefulness as a method of coercion and its effectiveness in achieving modest concessions from targeted democratic states, but includes some omitted
