Summer Reads: Bombshell: Women and Terrorism

As summer quickly comes to a close, we give you our last Summer Reads Review - Bombshell: Women and Terrorism by Mia Bloom. Bombshell examines the complex relationship between women and their involvement in terrorist organizations. Bloom explores the framing of women in terrorist organizations as political actors versus the over-simplified narrative of women as victims. Our Secure Future does not in any way condone terrorist activity undertaken by women, or men for that matter. Rather, we are interested in exploring the many valuable insights to be gleaned from this book—the most striking being that women play active roles in their communities with great influence outside the private sphere, and that women express their political agency in as many different ways as men do.

Bloom’s work is also informative about the roles women have in extremist violence, their ability to mobilize people and resources (similar to the findings of women who are active in peaceful civil society engagements), and the gender biases that countering violent extremism (CVE) practitioners may bring to their work on understanding these issues.

What motivates women to join?

Women participating in terrorist organizations may have joined by their own free will, been coerced into participation through family relations, or have been inspired to participate in a nationalist or ethnic movement by circumstances of state repression. While Bloom acknowledges cases in which women have been victims as forced or unknowing participant in terrorism, her research focuses on women who have expressed agency by deciding to participate in terrorist organizations for intersecting, complex reasons.

For Women, Peace and Security (WPS) practitioners, Bombshell is most valuable for insight on women’s motivations for mobilizing and their role within organizations. This analysis is critical to forming gendered approaches to preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) and curbing radicalization. Through several case studies, Bloom shows that women across a number of conflicts and several different terrorist organizations “tend to be motivated by one or several of the four R’s: revenge, redemption, relationship, and respect.” Each woman’s motivation for joining is unique – some fight for their families and communities, while others join because it provides a role beyond mother and wife. Although women may find unique opportunities for self-determination in this context, many terrorist organizations are aggressively patriarchal and women rarely ascend to leadership positions. Nonetheless, women have been shown to be highly effective members of terrorist organizations who must be included as targets of gendered P/CVE programming.

Women’s roles in terror organizations

Women make up a great deal of the invisible structure of terrorist organizations. They play critical roles in terrorist organizations and violent resistance movements as organizers and field agents engaged in intelligence gathering and recruiting, critical administrative workers, network communications professionals, armed fighters, and suicide bombers.

Women’s roles in Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) are one example of the critical invisible infrastructure that enables organizational effectiveness. JI is a jihadi terrorist group in Indonesia with links to al-Qaeda and responsible for the 2002 nightclub attacks in Bali that left 202 people dead. Without a headquarters, main office or public outreach, and operating in a geographically difficult country made up of thousands of islands, it has remained a mystery as to how JI’s network was able to grow and flourish to such high capacity. Women were the key to JI’s success and survival by forging critical links between disparate and geographically isolated groups, mostly through marriage alliances. Women of JI were also critical in providing financial support by making and selling Islamic headscarves, marketing Islamic herbal remedies, and engaging in cottage industries. Moreover, it is believed that JI’s chief financial accountant was a woman named Noralwizah Lee Binti. Without women’s participation, including in leadership positions, the reach and capacity of JI would have been far more limited.

Gendered approach to Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism

Not recognizing women as potential terrorists or assuming them to be immune to radicalization is a potential blind spot in P/CVE programming. Efforts to counter extremism and radicalization are hindered by the assumption that men are those radicalizing and recruiting, and women are the peacebuilders fighting against radicalization. Taking a gendered approach to radicalization, as Mia Bloom has done, will reveal that violent nationalist resistance movements and ideologically motivated terrorist organizations draw in women as well as men. Understanding radicalization propaganda geared towards women, the intersecting forces that drive them to join, and the critical organizational infrastructure they provide is crucial to designing effective, gender specific P/CVE approaches. Bloom’s work can help Women, Peace and Security practitioners acknowledge their own gendered stereotypes in analyzing violent women non-state actors.

Holistic, gender sensitive analyses of global issues, such as violent extremism and terrorist organizations, helps design effective programs to build a more peaceful future. For more on innovative P/CVE approaches that take a gendered approach, check out our blog on mothers fighting extremism.