My university, like almost all of them in the United States and many abroad, has cancelled face-to-face classes and switched everything over to what’s being called “remote instruction,” which is distinct from “online classes.”

My hunch is that the difference in terminology is a function of courses that were designed from get-go to be delivered virtually vs. what I had to do, which was figure out how to take my 3.5-hour discussion format class on terrorism and in two days transform it into something I could teach at a distance. What I ultimately settled on was a format where I’d record short mini-lectures on the reading I’ve assigned to my students, and then I ask them to participate in online discussion forums. We’ve got one week under our belts, and I’m not really sure who well it’s working, but this is as good as it is going to get.

But here’s the real point of this post: I figure if I’m spending the time to create these videos, maybe I should share some of them with a broader audience than the 30 students in my class. So here we go.

Next week’s class topic is the phenomenon of suicide terrorism, so here are two of the mini-lectures I’ve recorded for my students. Below is the first, a general introduction to the topic taken from the relevant chapter in Bruce Hoffman’s Inside Terrorism, which many consider the single best introduction to the topic of terrorism that’s out there, both for the general reader and for the academic audience.

The second video, below, summarizes some of the early work by Israeli psychologist and terrorism expert Ariel Merari. As you’ll hear in the video, one of the ways that Merari’s work stands out from the other pieces my students are reading for next week is in his argument that suicide terrorism, from the perspective of the perpetrator, is really all about the suicide, not necessarily the terrorism.

In short, Merari argues, suicide bombers really just want to commit suicide, and the act of terrorism becomes the vehicle by which they carry it out. In short, for the perpetrator, suicide terrorism is less a strategic choice and more a psychologically driven act. His acclaimed 2010 book, Driven to Death, lays out these arguments in significant detail.