Tactics of terrorism
Suicide terrorism is the most aggressive form of terrorism, pursuing coercion even at the expense of losing support among terrorists' own community. What distinguishes a suicide terrorist is that the attacker does not expect to survive a mission and often employs a method of attack that requires the attacker's death in order to succeed (such as planting a car bomb, wearing a suicide vest, or ramming an airplane into a building). In essence, a suicide terrorist kills others at the same time that he kills himself. Usually these tactics are used for a demonstrative purposes or to targeted assassinations. In most cases though, they target to kill a large number of people. Thus, while coercion is an element in all terrorism, coercion is the paramount objective of suicide terrorism.
Critical terrorism studies
There has been a huge amount of academic discussion about the ontological and epistemological foundations of critical terrorism studies. Within CTS, there is a broad agreement on the need to examine terrorism and terrorists from a historical, contextualized perspective asking 'how' questions of causation and constitution, rather than the more orthodox problem solving questions of a single isolated event. For instance, CTS questions why a terrorist action happens, asking whether the terrorists simply hate western notions of freedom, or whether they have deeper underlying political motivations? CTS adopts the ontological position that "terrorism" is fundamentally a social fact rather than brute fact.