More than 100 years ago, a French sociologist named Émile Durkheim did what nobody since has been able to do: He explained the mind of the suicide bomber.

That, at least, is the contention of numerous scholars and authors whose resurrection of Durkheim's ideas has been gaining traction within the field of terrorism studies...

"Durkheim's genius lay in identifying suicide as a social or political act, rather than as something genetically determined or some psychological impairment," Weinberg says in a telephone interview. "I realized the same thing worked with Palestinian `martyrs.'"