https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.683 Published online: 23 February 2021

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Women and Violent Extremism: Concepts and Theories
Imtashal Tariq, Department of , John Jay College of Criminal Justice
 and Laura Sjoberg, Department of Political Science, University of Florida

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.683
Published online: 23 February 2021

Summary

“Women” who engage in “violent extremism” are often portrayed in ways that
disassociate femininity from agency in violence, sensationalize the violence that women
do commit, and manipulate traits associated with femininity to portray women’s violence
as femininity gone wrong. The study of “women” and “violent extremism” suffers on a
variety of levels. First, both the category of “women” and the label of “violent extremism”
are definitionally fraught, political, and politicized. Second, there are gendered
obstructions to recovering and representing histories of women’s engagement in violent
extremism that make learning about the extent of the relevant behavior difficult at best.
Third, both existing theories themselves and the existing contours of the enterprise of
theorizing “women” and “violent extremisms” make the project of figuring out why
“women” commit “violent extremist” acts both difficult and problematic.

But why “women” engage in “violent extremism” is only an interesting question if you
believe that women necessarily have something in common. Otherwise, why “women”
engage in any given behavior is not any different than why people engage in that same
behavior. We argue that, rather than focusing on a causal relationship between an
essentialist understanding of gender and a politicized understanding of “violent
extremism,” it is more productive to think about the role that gender plays in shaping
“violent extremism,” conceptually and as it is practiced across a wide variety of groups
and locations around the world. “Violent extremism” is indeed gendered, just not in the
simple way where some generic motivation can be assigned to the participation of
“women” therein.

Keywords: women, gender, violent extremism, terrorism, international, feminism, violence,

international criminology

Introduction

A Guardian article on the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris highlighted a female suicide bomber,
who “is not the first, and will not be the last” (Burke, 2015). The article details a wide variety
of suicide attacks carried out by women but describes the women in passive voice—they “were
dispatched by” or launched by organizations, where the organizations are attributed the
agency—they “use” or “send” women (Burke, 2015). In the Guardian story, gender-related
assumptions about the women are mentioned frequently, including references to wifehood,

Imtashal Tariq, Department of , John Jay College of Criminal Justice
 and Laura Sjoberg, Department of Political Science, University of Florida

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.683

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widowhood, and feminized dependence (Burke, 2015). The reporter suggests that “the
advantage of using female suicide bombers by an organization can be simply tactical—they
can avoid suspicion more easily …— tactical or strategic … to shock, awe, terrorise, and to
attract as much attention as possible” (Burke, 2015). Scholars have followed suit, discussing
organizations’ strategic motivations for using women as if women are always and already
passive participants (see, e.g., Cunningham, 2003).

This Guardian article is not the exception to coverage about women engaged in what is
characterized as violent extremism. Often, “extremists,” “terrorists,” and “suicide bombers”
who are understood to be men are just called extremists, terrorists, and suicide bombers;
women who engage in these behaviors are called female extremists, female terrorists, and
female suicide bombers. This is because the assumed norm is that violent extremists are men,
and violent extremism is associated with masculinities. When women are nurses or mothers or
teachers, reporters do not say female nurses or female mothers or female teachers. Those
behaviors are understood to correspond to femininities. This Guardian article not only implies
that women engaging in violent extremism is itself newsworthy—it suggests that women who
perform violent extremist acts are doing so with little or no agency in their actions. The use of
passive voice around female violent extremists is endemic to a significant amount of media
coverage and research—it attributes women’s behaviors to the men around them, whether
they are leaders of organizations or men with whom the women have a personal relationship.
In the article, there is also the implication that the women who engaged in suicide bombing
are examples of femininity gone wrong—their marriages and their husbands’ deaths are
details (often the only details other than their sex) rendered relevant to their violences.

This article explores these dynamics in more depth and across a wide variety of discussions of
the relationship between “women,” gender, and “violent extremism.” It proceeds first by
talking about definitional and conceptual issues with the two key concepts in its title: the
category of “women” and the idea of “violent extremism.” After arguing that the substantive
and political boundaries of these ideas are fundamentally impossible to settle, we suggest that
it is possible to talk about how people understood to be women engaging in behaviors
characterized as violent extremism are framed in media coverage, governmental and
intergovernmental policy, and scholarly work. It continues to discuss historical perspectives
on the conceptual relationship between “women” and “violent extremism” by confronting the
difficulties in uncovering those histories, giving a brief overview of what we do know, and
engaging early scholarly conversations addressing the subject. A third section of the article
discusses the variety of explanatory perspectives on women’s participation in violent
extremism and offers a critique of the endeavor of theorizing the cause of women’s violent
extremism. A fourth section addresses some of the complex relationships between the concept
of women, genderings, and political violence that are recognized by feminist and decolonial
scholars, suggesting rethinking both categories. The article concludes by suggesting that
recognition of the fundamental weaknesses of current conceptual frameworks is essential to
any research agenda that engages these two topics, individually or in relation to each other.

Definitional and Conceptual Issues

This section discusses, in turn, the definitional and conceptual issues with the category of
“women,” the label of “violent extremism,” and the combination of the two ideas. It concludes
by outlining the strategy by which the remainder of this article manages these concepts.

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Women

It may at first appear that “violent extremism” is the only term that may need to be defined if
the scope of this article is “women and violent extremism.” After all, everyone knows what a
woman is, right? At least, everyone knows a woman when they see one? Or if you are one? The
category of “woman” is something that is often taken for granted, both in everyday life and in
scholarly inquiry. At the same time, it is a frequent feature of everyday life. In most places in
the world, it is required that people classify as either “a man” or “a woman” when they want
to do simple things such as travel or apply for a job or register to vote (see, e.g., Bowers &
Whitley, 2020; Shepherd & Sjoberg, 2012). At the same time, both research about and lived
experience of the category of “woman” suggest that it is not as simple as it seems.

First, to the extent that “man” and “woman” refer to categories of biological sex, the
delineation between them is less than clear and the dichotomy between them is less than
justified (see, e.g., Fausto-Sterling, 2000). When we ask what makes “a woman” fit into that
category, we get a wide variety of answers. Some people turn to the ability to reproduce, but
literally millions of people who are routinely classified as women do not have that ability for a
wide variety of medical reasons. Others turn to visual or other cues of the existence of
“female” sex organs, but medicine also sometimes necessitates mastectomies or
hysterectomies or other alterations, not to mention differentiation from the “norm” at birth.
Still others reference an XX chromosomal configuration (where ‘men’ are XY), but there are a
wide variety of other chromosomal configurations that people have outside those two. Others
suggest that the category remains biological in nature, but that the biology in it includes
people who are intersex and/or trans* and have some sort of biological predisposition to
identification with being female. Still others conflate the sex category “woman” with female/
feminine gender identity, where those who identify as female count as “women.”

Whatever one’s definition is of the category of “woman,” essentialist associations (things that
all women are expected to be or do) with womanhood are as old as the category itself (Witt,
2011). Some of those essentialist associations at least appear to be positive ones—women are
often seen to be more peaceful than men, more prone to care and care labor, and less drawn
to deviance or crime (e.g., Ruddick, 1983). Other associations carry a more negative
connotation—women are seen as more emotional than men (and therefore less rational),
weaker than men (and therefore less agential), and more prone to instability than men (and
therefore less predictable) (see discussion in Sjoberg & Gentry, 2007). Traits associated with
masculinities are often imputed to “men” while traits associated with femininities are imputed
to “women,” even as we gloss over not being certain who or what falls into these categories.

The same is the case in international and comparative criminology in theory and in practice.
In practice, a significant amount of the day-to-day process of jurisprudence is explicitly
associated with sex categories. s that proscribe behavior often do so sex-specifically.
Those in prisons are often kept together or apart by (presumed) sex. Sex and gender (with
class and race) have played a significant role in legal strategy, judicial decision-making,
academic analysis, and media portrayals across a wide variety of individual crimes committed
across the globe. Scholars have been critical of theories written about crime that presume
criminals are all male, but they often remedy that with theories of female crime that presume

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that men and women who engage in extralegal and/or violent behaviors do so for different
reasons, no matter how similar other factors in their backgrounds or decision-making
processes are.

For the purposes of this article, we will use the terms “women” and/or “female” in reference
and only in reference to the work of other texts that do so, as we engage their contributions
and findings. When we make our own references, it will be to “people read as women” and
“people read as men.” We make this choice for four reasons: (a) to show the inherent
instability of the categories; (b) to acknowledge the performative (and reiterative) nature of
gender; (c) to suggest that how gender is read matters in how behavior is read; and (d) to
argue that, while gender matters in important ways to understanding and analyzing crime and
criminology, a lens of sex dichotomy is largely useless.

Violent Extremism

The language of “violent extremism” differs significantly across disciplines and even subfields
of scholarship, media outlets, governments, and intergovernmental organizations. The most
frequently used word related to this literature is “terrorism,” especially in international and
comparative contexts. What “terrorism” is has been the subject of significant controversy.
Schmid and Jongman (2017) report the results of a survey of 109 experts in the field when
asked what is included in the category of terrorism—only three concepts are used in more
than half of the definitions: violence (83.5%), political (65%), and fear/terror (51%). When
distinguished from things referred to as violent crime, then, “terrorism” can be seen as both
political and with the intent or obvious effect of inspiring fear. At the same time, many who
use or hear the word “terrorism” associate with it other attributes, whether consciously or
unconsciously. For example, none of the top 10 terms in the definitions that Schmid and
Jongman report even suggest that state actors are not to be included in the definition of
terrorism. At the same time, almost all uses of the term “terrorism” describe the actions of
nonstates, and this is the case even when states engage in analogous behavior (see discussion
in Gentry & Sjoberg, 2014). Almost the only time that states are called “terrorist” is when that
term is used to call out their support for violent nonstate actors.

The term “terrorism” is also used to describe only a subset of violence that might fall under
any formal definition that is given. For example, Pain (2014) and Gentry (2015) suggest that
the violence usually referred to as “domestic” violence (a minimizing term) fits most if not all
definitions of “terrorism”—it is violent, it is political, it is intended to and has the effect of
inspiring fear and terror, it is systematic and organized, it is coercive—the list goes on. And
yet somehow it is not usually classified as “terrorist” violence. Likewise, when nonstate actors
bomb civilians, it is often labeled as “terrorism”; when state actors bomb civilians, it is often
labeled as “collateral damage” or with some other military jargon. Scholars have pointed out
that the word “terrorism” also has connotations that implicitly and sometimes explicitly
promote racial and religious biases. Caron Gentry (2020, pp. 3, 26, 51) demonstrates that the
pejorative term “terrorism” is “drawn along lines of pre-existing cultural biases” that
construct terrorism’s “disordered violence” as violence of the Other in ways that are
racialized, masculinized, and heteronormative.

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Across news sources and popular discourses, especially in the West, the word “terrorism”
remains in frequent use. Among scholars and policymakers, however, the word “terrorism” is
being replaced with the phrase “violent extremism.” The term “violent extremism” is usually
used in conjunction with vocabularies of radicalization and deradicalization: people are
“radicalized” into “violent extremism,” and “deradicalizing” them can be understood as part of
a package of tools to “prevent violent extremism” (PVE) or “counter violent extremism” (CVE).
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, 2020) defines “violent extremism” as
“encouraging, condoning, justifying, or supporting the commission of a violent act to achieve
political, ideological, religious, social, or economic goals.” In this definition, it is not clear
whether the willingness to use violence is itself what classifies “violent extremists” as
extremist or if it is the willingness to use that violence towards an end understood as itself
extremist. In either case, the term “extremist” is not defined. The United Nations Educational,
Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2017) similarly defines extremism by the use
of violence, making the term “violent extremism” redundant. The OECD’s (2016) definition
mentions views that foster violence in furtherance of a belief—which suggests that ideologies
about violence are extremist while others may not be. It also mentions the tendency to “foster
hatred” but does not expand on what that means or to whom the hatred must be aimed to be
declared extremist. The United Nations, the European Union, and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization all lack official definitions of the term even though it is frequently used in their
policy analysis and advocacy documentation.

Neither the meaning of the word “violent” in this context nor the meaning of the word
“extremism” is particularly clear. The term “violent” is most often used to discuss physical
violence, and the connotations of its use often suggest that the violence must be large-scale in
order to get the attention of those who would highlight, account for, and/or look to curb or
punish “violent extremism.” The term “extremism” is one that has significant political content.
For there to be “extremism,” there must be a calibration point—a center—of agreed-upon
“nonextremism.” That is not—it cannot be—an objective or neutral decision. Whether it refers
to religion, ideology, or political positioning, what counts as “extremist” and what counts as
“normal” is a subjective, political, and politicized decision. In practice, Western, liberal
democracies tend to use the term “extremist” to refer to those who would actively oppose the
separation of church and state and those who would reject colonially imposed borders. While
some may think that these are extremist views, others may find them politically justifiable—
and the difference may shift with time and political will. The phrase “one man’s terrorist is
another man’s freedom fighter” has been used often as a throwaway, but it is the case that
some people labeled “terrorist” are heroes to others, and that opinions about what side of that
line people fall on change over time. Perhaps the most famous example along these lines is
that of former South African President Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison and was
labeled a “terrorist” who conspired to overthrow the government. After that, he negotiated an
end to apartheid and was democratically elected to lead his state, winning the Nobel Peace
Prize along the way.

Many treat the term “extremism” either as related to the willingness to use violence or as the
sort of thing that is so easy to define it doesn’t need any definition at all—we all agree on what
is normal and what is extremist. This reifies pre-set boundaries of political reasonability and
who has the right to set what “appropriate” politics is—a subset in which everyone is expected
to contain their beliefs and their actions. It also reifies and amplifies the normative
connotations of “violent extremism” (which connotes “the bad guys”) and “countering violent

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extremism” or “preventing violent extremism” (which connotes “the good guys”), a dichotomy
which itself often operates on racial lines (Gentry, 2020). The language of “violent extremism,”
then, can be understood as circular both because it often seems to be the violence that
constitutes the extremism and because the idea of extremism is itself self-referential, where
the label “extremist” for those understood to be outside the acceptable norm is repeated and
reified until the constructed boundary appears natural. “Violent extremism” and challenging
dominant orders become conflated (Gentry, 2020).

Women and Violent Extremism

We have basically suggested that both terms in the title of this article have no meaning
outside the politicization that ascribes meaning to them, and that the politicized meaning
ascribed to those terms can be at best imprecise and at worst itself dangerous. So how will
this article mark its boundaries? It will largely refer to others’ discussions of the relationships
between “women,” gender, and “violent extremism,” engaging how those discussions signify
and represent both the category of “women” and the substance of “violent extremism.” In our
view, it is not necessary to define either term in order to discuss the existing research
addressing their overlap, its contributions, and its shortcomings—a fact that is fortuitous
given the impossibility of defining either term. We, then, deal with definitional problems by
attempting to be explicit when we address either people or actors and to be critical when we
engage others’ understandings of the categories that this article examines.

Historical Perspectives

There are three reasons that the question of the history of women’s involvement in “violent
extremism” is not a straightforward or easy one. The first involves the terms “terrorism” and
“violent extremism” being relatively new. The terminology of violent extremism and even of
terrorism certainly postdates people’s involvement in activities that might be classifiable in
those categories, including activities, behaviors, and political commitments of people
understood to be women. Therefore, discussions of those understood to be women who may
have participated in activities that would now be understood as violent extremism may not be
characterized as such as we try to explore archives for data about when and how women
participated in “violent extremism” in the past. Similar or even identical behaviors that would
not have been identified with this label in the past might be today, making it difficult to
compare the situations of the past and present. Second, feminist scholars have demonstrated
across disciplines that women have been left out of, or written out of, many (especially
political) sociologies and histories (e.g., Owens, 2018; Tickner & True, 2018). Often, “because
the historical record is focused on elite male experience it fails to illuminate the … experience
of nonelite men and virtually all women” (Peterson, 2014, p. 398). Given this, the project of
recovering women into histories of politics and/or political violence is not as straightforward
as doing research to find where the women are and/or were in traditionally framed histories.
Instead, “fixing women’s exclusion is a project of transformation rather than
recovery” (Sjoberg, forthcoming) which “potentially involves the re-writing of the thought
itself, transforming its accepted practices, genres, and locations” (Owens, 2018, p. 469). The
idea of just “adding women” into a preexisting matrix of narratives and theories will not work
—the narratives and theories themselves were constructed on the premise of women’s

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exclusion. Third, the previously discussed political and conceptual difficulties with the
categories both of “women” and of “violent extremism” make a historical account of women’s
involvement in violent extremism not only difficult but itself political—which people and what
behaviors might be retroactively fit into these categories, and what (if any) impact does that
refitting have?

Given this, the idea of any given (especially singular) history of “women” and “violent
extremism” would be both necessarily incomplete and necessarily a political project. Here, we
will attempt neither. We do note that people understood to be women have engaged in
activities that could be classified as violent extremism in a wide variety of places and across a
significant period of time. A quick (and woefully incomplete) survey of recent scholarship in
the field of International Relations (IR) finds empirical research on women’s political violence
in a number of contexts. Caron Gentry has done significant work on the women of the Italian
Red Brigade, the American Weather Underground, and the Peruvian Shining Path (Gentry,
2020; Gentry & Sjoberg, 2011). Swati Parashar (2011, 2014) has researched women in the
Kashmiri resistance as well as women in the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE). Sandra
McEvoy (2009) has written about loyalist women in Northern Ireland who participated in the
conflict. Megan MacKenzie (2009, 2012) did field research with female soldiers in Sierra
Leone. Miranda Alison (2004) has written about Republican women in Northern Ireland and
the women of the LTTE. Patricia Melzer (2015) wrote extensively about women in the Red
Army Faction in West Germany. Sikata Banerjee (2012) studied women’s violence in “muscular
nationalism” in India and Ireland. Reed Wood (2019) writes about what we know about
women’s roles in organized rebel movements from 1964 to 2009. Across these studies,
scholars find in media and governmental portrayals essentialist associations about what
“women” are and how that relates to their capacity to engage in, and their agency in their
actions during, varieties of “violent extremism.” We do not know if women are engaging in
“violent extremism” more often than in previous periods in history (either in total or compared
with men) or if their participation is just being recognized more, but we do know that both
popular and academic discussions of women’s political violence are increasing and women’s
participation is being recognized more frequently.

A history of the study of “women” and “violent extremism” may be as fraught as a history of
the phenomenon itself. As other articles in this …