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Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Criminology and Criminal Justice. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 01 March 2021

Women and Violent Extremism: Concepts and Theories Imtashal Tariq, Department of Sociology, 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 Sociology, 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

https://oxfordre.com/criminology/search?btog=chap&f_0=keyword&q_0=women

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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. Laws 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 handbook doubtless note, the study of gender is not new to criminology, as a wide variety of scholars have been discussing women, gender, and crime explicitly since the early 1970s. Women’s crimes, as a category distinct from “crimes” generally, have been of interest to researchers for significantly longer than that (Lilly, Cullen, & Ball, 2019, p. 236). While W. I. Thomas (1907) attributed increases in women’s crimes to the decline in their (sex-specific) structure of motionlessness, Otto Pollack (1950) argued that women are physiologically prone to deception (Lilly et al., 2019, pp. 236, 238). In 1893, the founder of the school of positivist criminology Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero (2004) made a genetic argument that criminal women are more devious and dangerous than criminal men. Many of these early studies of women’s crimes highlighted not only different reasons that women had to engage in criminal activity than the assumed baseline reasons men did, but also different crimes women could be expected to commit compared with the baseline crimes men could be expected to commit. Most theories of who commits crimes and how they come to do so are based on the assumption that the offenders are male; theories of women’s crimes often separate them from (men’s) normal or expected crimes.

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Perhaps this is why Walter Reckless (1961) “questioned whether any theory of delinquency would be accepted if a criminologist paused to consider whether it applied to women” (Lilly et al., 2019, p. 238). If a theory of why crime occurs does not account for the behavior of those understood to be women, then at least one of two things is the case: either women commit crimes for reasons different than men do and/or the theories are wrong overall. Lilly et al. (2019, p. 238) suggest it is possible that women’s social, economic, or personal situations are differentiated on the basis of sex and/or gender, and therefore women do commit crimes for different reasons than men do, but not because they are women but because they are situated differently in social and political life. This understanding has led some theorists to think about patriarchy as a cause of both men’s and women’s crimes, though it may cause them differently —where men compete for dominance and women fight relative deprivation (Lilly et al., 2019, p. 240). Still other accounts of women’s involvement in extralegal activity have attributed it to gender socialization (Lilly et al., 2019, p. 241) and/or the intersection of race, class, and gender (Ogle, Maier-Katkin, & Bernard, 1995; Simpson, 1991). Criminologists have also talked about “gendered pathways” to crime (Daly, 1992; Miller & Mullins, 2008), including, for men, pressures to conform to expectations of masculinities (Messerschmidt, 1993) and male peer support (DeKeserdy & Schwartz, 2013, 2015), and, for women, economic and social pressures associated with femininities and feminization. International criminologists have advocated for an intersectional approach to understanding and addressing the involvement of “women” in “violent extremism,” including paying attention to race, class, and ethnicity (Burgess-Proctor, 2006; Daly, 1992; Potter, 2013).

Accounts of women involved in “terrorism” or “violent extremism” have largely not followed the same pathways as work on women and/or gender in criminology more broadly. This is in part because it is not only criminologists who study women involved with or engaged in violent extremism—political scientists, IR scholars, and sociologists, to name a few, have shown interest in studying women’s extralegal political violence. Early attention to women’s engagement in violent extremism often sensationalized it, even in scholarly accounts, suggesting that women’s violence was both more dangerous and more normatively problematic than men’s violence (e.g., Cooper, 1979; Morgan, 1989). Cooper characterizes “female terrorists as devoid of any emotion other than anger, vengeance, and bloodlust” (Gentry & Sjoberg, 2011, p. 74). Morgan “simply portrays them as empty-headed women gone wrong” (Gentry & Sjoberg, 2011, p. 74).

This sort of thinking can be found across popular portrayals and scholarly accounts of women’s violent extremism. Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg (2015, p. 12) identified stories told about politically violent women as crossing three narrativizations: “as ‘mothers’, women who are fulfilling their biological destinies, as ‘monsters’, women who are pathologically damaged and are therefore drawn to violence, and/or as ‘whores’, women whose violence is inspired by sexual dependence and depravity.” A feminist research program on women and violent extremism in IR has engaged in “pointing out stereotyped, stylized narratives about violent women’s actions and providing alternatives which at once recognize the gendered nature of violence and a more complicated notion of how women engage in violence” (Gentry & Sjoberg, 2015, p. 13). Intersectional accounts have looked more at how matrixes of power impact the lives of, and readings of, those understood to be women living in and around that which is framed as violent extremism than looking at cause/effect relationships (e.g., Gentry,

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2020). Field research has supported this general orientation of the study of women’s political violence—scholars have come to see that it is important to understand the genderings around women’s involvement in political violence and in many accounts of that violence.

Explanatory Perspectives

A recent criminology textbook suggested that “postmodern feminism has all but disappeared in the US and the UK in criminology” (Lilly et al., 2019, p. 260). This now-extinct “postmodern feminism” was concerned with “deconstructing traditional explanations and categories of crime and offenders found in positivist thought” along with analyzing “constructed images of crime, including women offenders” (Lilly et al., 2019, p. 259). If those are the parameters of postmodern feminism in criminology, it is easy (and correct) to classify this article as within “postmodern feminism,” however disappeared that work may be across traditional criminology research. It is such, and cannot be anything else, because gender and feminist research into women’s political violence questions not only the categories of “women” and “violent extremism” but also the ways that many conventional approaches connect the two through traditional causal analysis.

We have already suggested that scholars, government officials, and media outlets (among others) who deploy the categories of “women” and “violent extremists” (separately and together) make claims that are empirically and normatively problematic. We have also suggested the dual impossibility and undesirability of histories of women’s participation in “violent extremism,” stemming from sex and gender biases in the subjects of histories and the substantive ways in which they are portrayed. We have suggested that sensation and stereotyping often make their way into purportedly objective or scientific reports of and scholarship about women’s political violence in ways that make the analysis not only gendered (e.g., Gentry & Sjoberg, 2015) but also raced and heteronormative (Gentry, 2020; Gentry & Whitworth, 2011; Khalid, 2011; Puar, 2007).

Here, we suggest that “a” theory or theories of the involvement of “women” in “violent extremism” face(s) not only the same obstacles but some additional difficulties related to the gendered nature of the sort of knowledge that is required to make the kind of causal theoretical claims that might constitute “a theory of” “women” and “violent extremism.” The indeterminacy of the terms involved and the corruption of (gendered) histories make theorizing (those understood to be) women in (that which is labeled as) violent extremism difficult. This difficulty is compounded by the need to decide on a definition for (and the adequacy of data in) both of those categories in order to think about their relationship. On top of that, there would have to be something both unique to women and that all women have in common for the question of why “women” engage in “violent extremism” to be an interesting one at all. If there is not something both unique and essential to being part of the category of “woman,” then the things to be theorized would be why people engage in “violent extremism,” and in what ways (the theory and practice of) “violent extremism” is gendered. To us, then, the very research question that inspires causal inquiry about “women” and “violent extremism” is fundamentally misguided because it constitutes the category of “women” as having some inherent meaning both generally and when it comes to political violence.

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Above and beyond that, many theoretical approaches to “women” and “violent extremism” provide a cause and effect analysis that reifies a particular gendered notion of the production of knowledge more generally. The assumption that theories developed by men about men for men can simply be “translated” to people understood to be women suggests that gender affected the substance of the theorizing but not the process of understanding how knowledge is produced. Feminist philosophers of science (e.g., Harding, 1998; Keller, 1985) have made the argument that it is not only the content of the knowledge but the ways of knowing that are gendered—where anything approximating “objectivity” would need to recognize that rote, rational choice, cause and effect theorizing should not be understood as adequate. Instead, recognizing practical knowledge, knowledge as experience, theory as practice, and marginal standpoints as sites of knowledge production (see, e.g., Brown, 1988; Enloe, 2010; Zalewski, 1996) should be a part of understanding and looking to redress the gendered nature of theorizing.

A significant amount of (especially policy) research on “women,” gender, and “violent extremism” has moved away from the language of singular cause to talk about “drivers” and “push” and “pull” factors. In this language, “drivers” and “push factors” are often synonymous, though “drivers” tend to attribute less choice to the agent of violence than “push” factors. “Push” factors are those that are said to push people away from their normal(ized), nonextremist lives, often referring to the political, social, and economic contexts in which people live. “Pull” factors are those that are said to attract people to violent extremist organizations (called VEOs in much of the literature), which could be either things organizations offer their members or factors in the psychological composition of the person being attracted that make them susceptible to recruitment (e.g., OSCE, 2019; UNDP, 2016). Even in this language, however, many accounts of the “drivers” and “push” and “pull” factors make assumptions about gender (and race and religion and nationality) that carry essentialist content, referring to things such as marriages and motherhood relationships for women and the availability of sexual opportunities for men (e.g., Hudson & Hodgson, 2020) We contend that the enterprise of theorizing why those understood as women “do” things classifiable as violent extremism is itself problematic, and we find problems in many of the existing theoretical accounts provided in both academic and policy research.

Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg (2015) go over several theories of (women’s) extremist violence prevalent in existing scholarly accounts that originate in criminology and/or psychology, including rational choice theory, radicalization theory, evolutionary theory, psychoanalytic theory, social learning theory, and narcissism theory. In this engagement, they note that rational choice theory assumes both masculine rationality and male decision-makers to engage with their expected utilities (Gentry & Sjoberg, 2015, p. 31). Radicalization theory, on the other hand, often discounts the agency of any person who engages in political violence, placing “good” people within the realm of the logical and “radical” people outside of it and creating in many ways the same divides and political problems that follow the deployment of terms such as “terrorism” and “violent extremism” (Gentry & Sjoberg, 2015, p. 34). Evolutionary theorists (e.g., Goetze & James, 2004) have made the argument that “violent extremism” is committed in the interest of furthering the reproductive success of one’s political, social, or ethnic group, but feminist theorists have shown how these approaches rely on reductionist notions of men, women, gender, and sexuality (Gentry & Sjoberg, 2015, p. 36; Kinsella & Sjoberg, 2019). Psychoanalytic theories often distinguish the psychological makeups of “men” and “women” in accounting for their engagement in violence, where

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aggression is understood to be instinctual in men, but women who engage in violence are acting against their natural instincts (Gentry & Sjoberg, 2015, p. 37). This approach, however, does not provide a logic by which women would be naturally less inclined to violence or a logic by which some women would be compelled to act against these (alleged) instincts.

Social learning theories suggest that people’s behaviors generally stem from observed and reinforced behaviors around them rather than some innate characteristics. Theories of women’s engagement in crimes that discuss gender socialization and/or gender-based paths to those crimes are social learning theories. These suggest that particular things in the experience of being (treated as) “a man” or “a woman” teach people who engage in violence to do so. Gentry and Sjoberg (2015, p. 38) suggest that, in practice, many social learning approaches tend to normalize the things men may have “learned” from (including video games or childhood roleplaying) while placing the social learning that results in women’s violence outside of “normal” experiences and behaviors based on gender. In so doing, social learning approaches may reify essentialisms and sensationalisms around women’s violence. Narcissism theories of violence focus on an individual’s psychological composition to account for the individual’s engagement in violence. Feminist political theorists (e.g., Hirschmann, 1989) have argued that understanding individuals as fully autonomous is both inaccurate and gendered, especially in evaluating their social and political interaction. On top of this, while narcissism theory appears to be sex-neutral, the image of self-centeredness on which narcissistic personality disorder is based is male, and masculinity is used (at least in part) to account for the narcissist’s inflated sense of entitlement and sense of self (see Gentry & Sjoberg, 2015, p. 39).

Many discussions of women’s engagement in violence in mainstream political science and IR do not go so far as to invoke these theoretical perspectives. Instead, they either assume that women’s involvement (to the limited extent that it is believed to exist) is involuntary or anomalous, or they explain women’s participation by some factor assumed to be unique to women. As such, the category of “woman violent extremist” confounds expectations both about what a “violent extremist” is and about what a “woman” is (Coulter, 2008). It is this (apparent) paradox that creates spaces for the mother, monster, and whore narratives, and other sensationalizations of women’s violence. “Violent extremism” engaged in by “women” is often explained away either as an anomaly or as a bastardization of femininity. Even more nuanced approaches often end up reifying either sex-based essentialism (the belief that women necessarily have something essential in common) or gender essentialism (the belief that women’s experiences give them something in common).

Within criminology, a variety of feminist approaches to criminology provide some alternative frameworks. While liberal feminism in criminology (e.g., Daly, 1992) invokes gender socialization frameworks, radical feminists relate women’s (previous) victimization to their (current) engagement in extranormative behavior, and Marxist feminists note the importance of accounting for the economic status of “women” in accounting for their (need for) crime (see descriptions in Renzetti, 2013). In political science and IR, scholars have cautioned against assuming women’s victimhood or minimizing their agency in their political choices (see, e.g., Gentry & Sjoberg, 2015), especially as those framings impact the people they are mapped onto and the global political landscape itself (Gentry, 2020).

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Engagement with these gender-based and “gender neutral” theoretical approaches, alongside our understandings of the problems with the concepts of both “women” and “violent extremism,” lead us to as questions not about women and violent extremism but about gender and genderings in performances of political violence more generally.

Gender Lenses Looking at Violent Extremism

Even if it does not make sense to focus on those understood to be women who engage in acts labeled as violent extremism, that does not mean that gender analysis is rendered useless when it comes to the study of “violent extremism.” While some theoretical approaches to (“women” and) “violent extremism” overreach when they suggest that the social, economic, and/or personal situations of “women” position them (writ large) differently than “men” are positioned vis-à-vis motivations and opportunities to engage in “violent extremism” (and/or other criminal acts), it remains important to think about gender both when we think about what counts as “violent extremism” and when we think about the people who commit acts across the spectrum of “violent extremism.” Thinking through a “gender lens” (Peterson & Runyan, 1992) is a methodology of asking what we see differently about a concept or set of concepts when we ask where gender is in them and what work it is doing.

As mentioned previously, there are a number of behaviors or sets of behaviors that are rarely if ever labeled as “terrorism” or “violent extremism” despite technically fitting the definitions that are frequently provided for those terms—Gentry (2020) calls it “misogynistic terrorism.” Rachel Pain (2014) argues that “domestic” violence—that is, partner and/or familial abuse within a household—fits the definition of “terrorism”: it is meant to inspire fear and compel behavior, it is violent, it is controlling, it is political, and the victims are people who would generally be described as “civilians” in any reasonable interpretation of the term. But “counterterrorists” do not fight sexism—in fact, many scholars have shown that counterterrorism efforts are themselves quite gendered (see, e.g., Brown, 2015; Gentry, 2016; Pratt, 2013). Levels of gender-based and sexual violence remain high around the world, with some places having higher levels than others (see, e.g., Htun & Weldon, 2018). It is about time that sexism was considered both “violent” and “extremist,” to say nothing about violence motivated by sexisms. Homophobia, homophobic violence, trans* phobia, and trans* phobic violence have been described accurately as transnational political phenomena (see, e.g., Weiss & Bosia, 2013). Homophobia is “extremist.” In several places around the world, white supremacist movements have seen a recent resurgence (see, e.g., Gentry, 2020; Hartzell, 2018). There’s no doubt, after events such as Charlottesville or threats such as the intentional spread of coronavirus (Allam, 2018; Sheth, 2020), that white supremacy is violent even when it is not labeled as “terrorist” (for longstanding accounts of this violence, see, e.g., Blee, 1996, 2005; Lower, 2013). Often, race animus and gender subordination combine in violence in conflict and genocide, perhaps only not labeled “terrorist” or “violent extremist” because it is committed by governments (see, e.g., Gentry, 2020; Sharlach, 1999).

In discussing the tenets of decolonial feminism, Maria Lugones (2010, p. 742) proposes “a rereading of modern capitalist colonial modernity itself” where “the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized” is to be understood in terms of gender, race, and sexuality. As Lugones (2010, p. 745) explains, in colonial modernity, a “dichotomous hierarchy between the human and the non-human” underlies political and social classification, where the nonhuman

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Others are contrasted against white/European/bourgeois/modern man as the standard for humanity. Other decolonial, postcolonial, and critical thinkers have emphasized this point: various loci of power in global politics (and the study thereof) are able to normalize “racialized power and knowledge relations as they play out across multiple political, economic, and epistemic sites” (Tucker, 2018). This can be seen in the classification of what is (and is not) counted as violent extremism being structured around whether it is white/European/ bourgeois/modern man engaging in the behavior, or his constituted Other.

Our point is not to suggest directly that some of the things considered “extremist” by contemporary political discourses are normatively good or not “extreme”—that discussion can happen at another time and in another place. Instead, our point is to suggest that sexism, heterosexism, racism, Orientalism, and colonialism not being at the forefront of discussions of “extremism” (and often not being understood as “extremist” at all) demonstrates a political commitment to a normatively problematic “center” or “norm” of politics and ideology. The forces of sexism, heterosexism, and racism are visible in significant gaps in almost all reportable statistics about human lives and well-being: there are documented pay gaps, gaps in the provision of healthcare, gaps in legal protections, gaps in the level of violence one can expect in one’s life, gaps in available resources and opportunities … the list goes on. Yet radical feminists or decolonial activists are much more likely to be characterized as “extremist” than the political and social structures that keep the subordination of people at the margins of global politics in place.

What counts as “violent extremism” is not the only place where gender lenses reveal complexity. However we define “extremism,” people both commit “extremist violence” and react to it in a world that is heavily gendered. These genderings manifest in some ways that are discussed frequently—where people understood to be women are both assumed less capable of violence (and self-defense) and provided fewer resources with which to deal either with violence or with whatever its underlying motivations may be because of presuppositions made about what women are and where they belong (see, e.g., Nacos, 2005; Ortbals & Poloni- Staudinger, 2014). They also manifest in some ways that are discussed, if less frequently, where gender-based behavior and personality expectations (and/or frustrations with them) do play a role in when and how people engage in violence and how that violence is read, understood, and consumed (see, e.g., Alison, 2011; Gentry & Sjoberg, 2015). Other ways that genderings affect the performance, reading, reification, and repetition of extremism are less studied but no less important, including relationships between pornography and the enactment and consumption of extremism (see, e.g., Bhattacharyya, 2013; Gentry, 2020), the gendered manifestations and readings of “counterterrorist” and CVE efforts (see, e.g., Giscard d’Estaing, 2017; Sjoberg, 2015), and the gendered nature of legal structures and proceedings around “violent extremism” (e.g., Askin, 2003; Ni Aolain, 2006), to name a few.

Concluding Thoughts

In this article, we have suggested there exist both research and media engagements with the concepts of “women” and “violent extremism,” the overwhelming majority of which treat both of those categories as unproblematic, even though both have substantial political and normative problems. We suggest that genderings pervade both efforts to understand histories of “women” and “violent extremism” and efforts to theorize the relationship between the two concepts. We argue that gender lenses inspire the rethinking of both gender and “violent

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extremism,” how they relate, and how they are read. While we realize such a “postmodern” approach is almost absent from (international and comparative) criminology, we believe it is a contribution that feminist work in politics and IR can make to (feminist) criminology.