‘ Suicide missions and vocabularies of motives . Risk , danger and the primacy of communication ’ (

The article tries to explain suicide missions of islamic extremism. The sociological routine of explaining actions by external attribution of causal forces (poverty, oppression) is avoided and substituted by a system-theoretical approach. This approach allows internal attributions while constructing conflict systems of the Near (and middle) East with global reach. It further allows to differentiate ‘inner motives’ and communication, which refers to ‘vocabularies of motive’. These vocabularies are the core of conflict-systems, which consist of communications structuring a difference between system and environment and producing a central code of retaliation. Actors and their motives are rather by-products of these systems than the other way around. Eventually authenticity is proposed as a general frame of reference opposing all forms of oppression and corruption. An evolutionary result of this contagious frame is the spreading of more or less extreme protest movements experiencing authenticity by searching for it. Suicide missions will be explained as an improbable but ‘normalized’ effect of religiously escalated ‘vocabularies of motive’. These allow a paradoxical expiation by taking one’s life for ‘the cause’.