Paradoxical Rebellion: ISIS, Women and Traditional Gender Ideology - Gurpreet Kaur

Gurpreet Kaur

Global-Counter Terrorism Institute LLC Internship

Individual Paper

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Abstract

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For women who have actively chosen to join terrorist groups, the question becomes, what informs this agency? What is so appealing about an ideology that sees the reinforcement of traditional roles for women informing such an agency? It is this ‘why’ that remains elusive. This paper attempts to examine the ‘why’ informing the gender ideology of terrorist groups, focusing on ISIS. This paper will show that the ‘jihadi brides’ of ISIS—the foreign young women who are radicalized and leave everything and everyone in their home countries to marry ISIS men—enact a paradoxical rebellion in joining a terrorist group and embracing wholeheartedly the traditional gender roles espoused by a terrorist organization such as ISIS. By embracing traditional gender roles in ISIS, these women go against acceptable norms and restrictions at home in their communities and countries. Such an action gives them an agency they otherwise feel they do not have recourse to in their lives. The push and pull factors that compel women to join ISIS will be examined, and the implications of these factors will be explored in this paper.

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Contents

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List of Abbreviations? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 3

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1. Introduction? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 4

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2. ISIS: Nation and Women ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 8

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3. Joining ISIS: Push Factors ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 9

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4. Joining ISIS: Pull Factors? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 12

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5. Implications ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 14

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6. Conclusion ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 18

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7. Bibliography? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 19

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List of Abbreviations

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CVE

Countering Violent Extremism

FTF

Foreign Terrorist Fighters

ISIS

Islamic State of Syria and Iraq

LGBTQI

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex

UK

United Kingdom

UNGA

United Nations General Assembly

UNODC

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

UNSC

United Nations Security Council

USA

United States of America

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Paradoxical Rebellion: ISIS, Women and Traditional Gender Ideology

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1. Introduction

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The role of women in wars and conflicts is not new. From struggles and revolutions for independence during colonization, witnessed even during the Arab Spring, to their role as suicide bombers in terrorism and terrorist groups, women have always participated in such conflicts. However, when discussing security, wars, and conflicts, more often than not, women are often portrayed as victims or as passive participants (Aakster, 2020; Bloom and Lokmanoglu, 2021; Sjoberg, 2011). The remit of security, war, and terrorism is usually seen as a male domain. It is this perception that has typically informed the international community’s response (and indeed the general public’s response) to female radicals and female terrorism (Pearson, 2018). The media, in turn, typically portrays such women as brainwashed and without any agency, either as pawns or victims (Bloom and Lokmanoglu, 2021). Mia Bloom and Ayse Lokmanoglu state that popular media typically references women through “patriarchally deemed names such as ‘jihadi brides’…and ‘Black Widows,’” nomenclature based on “men’s control of power” (2021). Although a significant number of women choose to corroborate in terrorism for sheer survival--as several women did in Iraq and Syria during the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) takeover, and many others were trafficked—there are others who have actively chosen to leave their homes and therefore have had agency in their decisions.

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For these women who have actively chosen to join terrorist groups, the question then becomes, what informs this agency? What is so appealing about an ideology that sees the reinforcement of traditional roles for women informing such an agency? Why would young, educated women choose to leave countries such as the United Kingdom (UK), Germany, Denmark, Belgium, among others, and go to Syria to join the ISIS caliphate? During the last seven years, there has been a sharp increase in the interest in gendered dimensions of terrorism, particularly with the rise of ISIS and its active recruiting of women. Through these studies, the ‘how’ of gendered aspects of terrorism has been mainly answered: How have women participated as suicide bombers, how have women been recruited online by terrorist groups using social media, and how have women been radicalized? It is the ‘why’ that remains elusive. Why have women found such ideologies attractive? Why do young women gravitate towards extremely traditional gender roles espoused by ISIS, to the extent that they give up everything—family, friends, country—to go abroad and fight a war that is not theirs?

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This paper is an attempt to look at the ‘why’ informing the gender ideology of terrorist groups, focusing on ISIS. This paper will show that the ‘jihadi brides’ of ISIS—the foreign young women who are radicalized and leave everything and everyone in their home countries to marry ISIS men—enact a paradoxical rebellion in joining a terrorist group and embracing wholeheartedly the traditional gender roles espoused by a terrorist organization such as ISIS. By embracing traditional gender roles in ISIS, these women go against acceptable norms and restrictions at home in their communities and countries. Such an action gives them an agency they otherwise feel they do not have recourse to in their own lives. It is this agency that continues to baffle many scholars and practitioners in the fields of security and counterterrorism. It is precisely this idea that “women would willingly support or act on behalf of a group that would seek to strip them of their basic human rights [that] has been unfathomable to the public” (Speckhard and Ellenberg, 2021). Again, this phenomenon is not new, but poorly understood, as stated by Speckhard and Ellenberg (2021).

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The studies that probe the ‘why’ of women joining ISIS in such unprecedented numbers galvanized particularly around the years 2018-2021 (Bloom and Lokmanoglu, 2021; Brown, 2020; Moaveni, 2019; ITV News (Shamima Begum), 2019; Pearson, 2018; Pearson, Winterbotham and Brown, 2020; Salcedo, 2019; Speckhard and Ellenberg, 2021), with a few exceptions such as “Till Martyrdom Do Us Part: Gender and the ISIS Phenomenon” by Erin Marie Saltman and Melanie Smith (2015) and “Women, Gender and Daesh Radicalisation: A Milieu Approach” by Elizabeth Pearson and Emily Winterbotham (2017), which were published a few years earlier. There has been a perceptible shift from analysing these women's online presence and social media accounts, to obtaining first-hand interviews, narratives, and accounts of women who left to join ISIS. There was an uptick in this trend around the time Nadia Murad won the Nobel Peace Prize as a former ISIS sex-slave of the Yazidi community. Her accounts and interviews brought the world face-to-face with the horrors that these survivors went through. There were significant problems in reconciling the brutalities that survivors such as Murad went through, with the sheer number of foreign women who had actually left everything and gone to Syria to join ISIS. The problems were not just in imagining the irreconcilability of these two poles, but also in articulating it. How do we know what the solution to something is if we do not even know how to articulate what the problem is in the first place?

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Azadeh Moaveni’s ground-breaking study of more than 20 young women who left their respective home countries of Tunisia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sudan, Jordan, the UK, Germany, and Belgium, among others, sets the stage for piecing together the ‘why.’ Her book, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS (2019), pieces together first-hand accounts and information from the ‘jihadi brides’ themselves. Around the same time, she published an article in The Guardian, “It could have been me: On the trail of the British teenagers who became 'brides of Isis'” (2019). There is a very telling moment in that article. Moaveni states:

I thought nothing was more romantic than radicals who fought against all this injustice, and ached to run away to the Middle East to join some inchoate resistance struggle. I found our life in Silicon Valley suburbia soulless and vacant, chafed at my mother’s you-mustn’t-become-like-them strictness, and felt like I did not belong. … To be offered an escape from conservative parents, persuaded [these girls and women] were doing something at once fiercely adventurous and perversely liberating – such delusions seemed incomprehensible to the white female columnists criticising them. But to my mind, it seemed relatable. (Moaveni, 2019, emphasis mine)

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Moaveni seems to be echoing what Shamima Begum, a teenage girl who left the UK in 2015 to join ISIS at fifteen years old, says in a television interview after the UK revoked her citizenship in 2019 for being a ‘jihadi bride’: that she felt like she didn’t belong and had no purpose when she joined ISIS (ITV News interview, 2019). This deep need that women had to be included in some sort of way as a citizen, or “having no sense of place as a citizen” (Moaveni, 2019, The Guardian) drove many women to the brink of despair due to their particularized experience of marginalization and disempowerment through repressive political regimes, social status, religious sects and affiliations and identities and roles adopted in the family and community. Many Muslim women have reported feeling like second-class citizens in their own countries. This vulnerability, in turn, effected a route into the ISIS recruitment drive, “a group that saw their own needs and pretended to offer a solution” (Moaveni, 2019, The Guardian).

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Anne Speckhard and Molly Ellenberg’s paper “ISIS and the Allure of Traditional Gender Roles” is the latest study to come out this year (2021) in trying to answer why so many women seem to find ISIS attractive. This study is unique because it foregrounds private interviews with 259 ISIS men and women “to examine the psychosocial aspects of joining, participating in, and leaving ISIS, and how they are informed by gender” (2021). Although the study is very promising, Speckhard and Ellenberg’s paper gets tangled in data webs that do not tease out the intricacies of the motivations behind the foreign women who joined ISIS in droves. Also, Speckhard and Ellenberg (2021) have not referenced Moaveni’s study and accounts of women joining ISIS. This absence is quite strange, considering that Moaveni has painstakingly pieced together the deeper structural issues that influenced the women’s decisions to join ISIS as ‘jihadi brides.’

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This paper uses Moaveni’s, Speckhard, and Ellenberg’s studies, along with the broader studies informing the gendered aspects of ISIS, to form a springboard for my research into this topic and to attempt to answer the question of why women enact a paradoxical rebellion in joining ISIS.

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2. ISIS: Nation and Women

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ISIS, as a terrorist organization, distinguished itself very early on as uniquely positioned in terms of its online presence, outreach and recruitment via social media and other platforms, and its wealth. The factors of social media outreach and wealth, in particular, saw a recruitment drive of both women and men as never seen before in other terrorist organisations such as al-Qaeda (who denounced ISIS as not reflecting ‘true’ Islamic values). Speckhard and Ellenberg state that “the sheer number of women who joined ISIS was unique, as was their diversity, in contrast to previous terrorist groups, who far more often did not use females or relied on local women versus attracting them as foreign fighters” (2021, also quoted in Saltman & Smith, 2015). The reasons for this are several-fold, but one reason that sticks out amongst others is that ISIS declared itself as a caliphate and a state. In Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Anderson defines the nation-state as “an imagined political community” (Anderson, 1983). This is very much in line with how ISIS espoused its imaginary caliphate to be and went ahead and anchored that imagined political community to the geographical bounds of Syria and Iraq, with the ambitions to expand the physical territory of the caliphate further. It is through this establishing of themselves as a state that they could offer women a “comfortable life as a wife and mother,” something that, according to Speckhard and Ellenberg, “no other terrorist group before could offer” (2021). It is this creation of the ‘state’ by ISIS that proves to be the point of entry for agency for these women, the so-called ‘jihadi brides,’ a term which itself has been criticized and problematized by gender analysts (Bloom and Lokmanoglu, 2021; Brown, 2020; Moaveni, 2019; Speckhard and Ellenberg, 2021). Speckhard and Ellenberg contend that through online propaganda, ISIS “promised women a utopic state in the making that offered them better and easier lives with free housing, salaries for their husbands, and a life free of discrimination and the constraints and pressures of secular society” (2021). This point of entry into the caliphate proves to be the first point in which these ‘jihadi brides’ exercise their agency. In doing so, ISIS then became the first jihadist group that placed women at the forefront of its recruitment drive, using traditional gender roles to offer a modicum of stability: stable jobs with salaries, the possibility of homeownership, and a life without facing discrimination because they were practicing Muslims. ISIS needed women to maintain their state-building capacity. In a twisted way, it rolled out what Moaveni calls a women’s strategy to counter the feelings and despair of feeling like second-class citizens but contributing to nation-building in the caliphate in a very material and tangible way.

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3. Joining ISIS: Push Factors

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One of the most commonly stated push factors that routinely comes out of the analyses of ‘jihadi brides’ is that, more often than not, they come from traditional, conservative, and patriarchal backgrounds. Through the Islamic state and the traditional gender roles of wife, mother, and homemaker, “ISIS’s empowering propaganda [especially] appealed to women living in conservative households where decisions were being made for them about their futures, as? ISIS religiously justified and empowered their taking their futures into their own hands by deciding to travel to join ISIS” (Speckhard and Ellenberg, 2021). This is a crucial point to illustrate the agentic nature of these women, but what is missing from this analysis is what class these women belonged to. Moaveni’s study (2019) highlights that several women who joined ISIS from countries such as Tunisia, Sudan, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Europe, came from a disadvantaged socioeconomic background. The conservative patriarchal familial structure operates very strongly: “Go to University! Study hard! Don’t talk to boys!” (Moaveni, 2019), to name a few injunctions operative in these women’s lives. Girls and women from this background experience limited agency and limited say in their daily lives. Fathers and brothers make decisions, and those decisions are followed. ISIS as caliphate and state, pushing the roles of wife and motherhood as a cause celebre, letting these women feel empowered in making a decision for themselves to go to Syria to join ISIS, and contributing materially in nation-building, i.e., producing the ‘cubs’ of the caliphate. These ideas operate as a powerful motivator because many of these women do not feel they can participate actively as citizens in their own homes and home countries (Aakster, 2020; Ingram, 2016; Moaveni, 2019; Speckhard and Ellenberg, 2021). This is precisely how the paradoxical rebellion functions: the women rebel against restrictions where they feel disempowered. In choosing to join ISIS as ‘jihadi brides,’ they rebel against these restrictions, their families, own countries. However, the rebellion is paradoxical because what they choose to go towards instead is even more traditional, conservative, and patriarchal.

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However, as mentioned earlier, class differences are an important consideration. An upper-middle-class Muslim woman would have different choices and recourse to the marginalization she feels in her societal context. Differential access to resources, such as education, finances, and employment opportunities (which attracted several ‘jihadi brides’ to ISIS in the first place) means that class differentials are an important factor that dictates when militancy becomes an alluring option for these women (Gonzalez-Perez, 2008; Moaveni, 2019). This is an important consideration often overlooked in some studies and reports, such as the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality’s report “Radicalisation and violent extremism” (2017). In writing about the motivations of Sharmeena, one of the first 15-year-old schoolgirls from London to go to Syria, Moaveni elucidates:

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Perhaps, as might well have happened if she existed in a more educated family and world, someone might have told her there were other avenues for dissent and other ways to help vulnerable Muslims across the world… There were many things a young woman could do with rage. But it took an attentive, intact family, living rooms with books, a sensitive school, layers of protection that often didn’t exist around working-class girls from East London to introduce those ideas. (Moaveni, 2019)

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Moaveni tries to point out that differential access, while opening doors for women to become lawyers, journalists, educators, amongst others, also closes such doors for other women—the “other avenues for dissent” thus not equally available to women when they find such doors shut (Moaveni, 2019).

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The anger these young Muslim women felt, which forms another push factor for joining ISIS, is explained in detail by Saltman and Whitman (2015). They outline three elements:

1. Feeling socially and/or culturally isolated, including questioning one’s identity and uncertainty of belonging within a Western culture.

2. Feeling that the international Muslim community is being violently persecuted.

3. Anger, sadness and/or frustration over a perceived lack of international action in response to this persecution (Saltman and Whitman, 2015).

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Many women and girls explicate in the interviews (and based on their online profiles from earlier studies such as Saltman and Whitman, 2015) that as a minority community in Western countries or as minority practitioners of Islam in other countries, particularly in the wake of post-9/11 Islamophobia, they experience a sense of isolation and do not feel as if they belong in their respective societies. The wearing of the hijab has become a bone of contention in many countries, where “[w]omen who wear a headscarf or veil have been shown to experience discriminatory comments in public more frequently than Muslim men due to their appearance, which serves as an identity marker for being Muslim” (Saltman and Whitman, 2015). The media, too plays a role in these feelings of cultural and social isolation and exclusion (Aakster, 2020; Baele, Boyd, and Coan, 2020; Moaveni, 2019; Saltman and Whitman 2015). How terrorism is reported and its depiction in popular media such as movies and television plays a vital role in social perceptions and stereotypes, where the twinning of ‘terrorist’ with ‘Muslim’ has led to further prejudices. These women and girls then talk about the persecution of the Muslim community internationally by referencing the current conflicts that are happening around the world along with the media representations, and their feelings are reinforced by the violent images circulated on social media through the process of radicalisation, in this case by ISIS (Saltman and Whitman, 2015). Feelings of anger and frustration start setting in at the lack of international action to the persecution of the Muslim community, where “throughout the process of radicalisation a cognitive behavioural pathway starts to build itself around the extremist propaganda that manifests itself as an alternative reality” (Saltman and Whitman, 2015).

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These factors are not only applicable in Western contexts. Increasingly, women and girls from countries such as Tunisia, Sudan, Indonesia, and Malaysia joined ISIS for similar reasons, especially as they feel their governments and communities are letting them down. Nour, a Tunisian girl that Moaveni interviewed, put on the niqab, and in Nour’s words, it was “a natural act of defiance for a teenage girl” (Moaveni, 2019), which led to her teacher in school trying to rip it off her. Nour then stops going to school as she is shunned by her teachers and fellow students. Nour’s rebellion is paradoxical, too. Nour’s agency and choice in rebelling against the state institutions and her family was to join ISIS after she felt isolated within her community because she was shunned for wearing the niqab. However, that choice was borne out of frustration tied to the “working-class neighbourhood in a country where the state micro-policed people’s piety” (Moaveni, 2019).

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4. Joining ISIS: Pull Factors

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Stopping at such an analysis, however, would be too simplistic. The women’s agency and motivations go beyond patriarchal injunctions and conservative family norms or governments and institutions that they rebelled against. The push factors are inextricable from the pull factors and feed into each other.

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These women’s rebellion is also paradoxical in another way. These foreign women who left their home countries to join ISIS held other various roles in the Caliphate too: that of recruiters, enforcers, and members of the al-Khansa brigade (the morality police of ISIS) who tortured locals, language instructors, doctors, and mid-wives. In these roles, the women who joined ISIS found a sense of agency and empowerment described as “heroic dominance rather than meek subservience” (Speckhard and Ellenberg, 2021) by Aisha, a Kenyan interviewed by Speckhard and Ellenberg. Aisha gave her account as follows:

[Aisha] remembers looking online and seeing “pictures of Islamic women, dressed all in black stockings and gloves and niqab and she was holding an AK-47 […] She was independent. …When Aisha decided to carry out a suicide mission, she was exhilarated by what she believed was her chance to act in a heroic role on behalf of Islam. (Speckhard and Ellenberg, 2021, emphasis mine)

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Similarly, Umm Rashid, another ISIS woman interviewed by Speckhard and Ellenberg, stated that she felt that her membership in “ISIS’s hisbah, the morality police, allowed her to take back a power she felt she had lost when she was forced to drop out of school because of the war and a series of traumas occurred” (Speckhard and Ellenberg, 2021).? Aisha and Umm Rashid’s accounts highlight paradoxical rebellion and agency in the sense of empowerment they feel they can wrest back into their lives by performing violent acts.

From the latest interviews conducted by Moaveni, Speckhard, and Ellenberg, the sense of empowerment is a new development and quite a powerful motivator, as a pull factor from the list Saltman and Whitman (2015) came up with:

1. Idealistic goals of religious duty and building a utopian ‘Caliphate state’

2. Belonging and sisterhood

3. Romanticisation of the experience (Saltman and Whitman, 2015)

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The pull factors of “idealistic goals of religious duty and building a utopian ‘Caliphate state’” and “belonging and sisterhood” are tied to the push factors of cultural and social isolation, and the feeling that the Muslim community is being persecuted internationally, which leads these women to place a sense of belonging within the ISIS caliphate. Hence, the enactment of the paradoxical rebellion is the belief of having agency and power in their own lives, where ISIS is portrayed to offer these women an alternative source of female empowerment rooted in uber-traditional gender norms and roles, but at the same time, they have a possibility of recourse to violence through being suicide bombers or killing and torturing civilians as the women in the morality police.

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It is also important to note that, by and large, researchers have found that the push and pull factors do not differ for men and women when joining ISIS. Men have reported joining ISIS for the sense of adventure, romance, and the “draw of traditional gender roles and the attraction of the hyper-masculine portrayal of ISIS” (Speckhard and Ellenberg, 2021) so that they can take on the role of being a protector and breadwinner of the family.

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5. Implications

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For the purposes of organising this paper, I have used the model of push and pull factors, routinely used in such studies, to explicate why women join ISIS by enacting a paradoxical rebellion that gives them a sense of agency and empowerment. However, this model has been heavily criticized in the recent years, especially after the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality report in 2017 (Moaveni, 2019) on women and violent extremism. This report was criticized for being decontextualized, historically, politically, and socio-culturally, and for the language deployed in the report to describe women who joined ISIS. The report, and indeed other institutional bodies and the general public, insist on finding one single motivation, drive or angle to understand the muhajirat—female migration for the purpose of joining ISIS—by employing strict categorizations such as push and pull factors. What Moaveni, Speckhard, and Ellenberg’s studies show is that there are multiple and diverse motivations. The women who join ISIS, the ‘jihadi brides’ themselves, openly illustrate this in their interviews, social media postings, and their interactions on social media with others. Due to these diverse motivations and variations, “it remains difficult, and highly controversial, to broadly label individuals or groups as being ‘at risk’” (Saltman and Whitman, 2015), which remains one of the challenges encountered by counter-terrorism strategies.

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One major problem to contend with is the fact that to understand and deal with problems that a group such as ISIS posed (and still poses today with the ISIS-Khorasan active in Afghanistan), it is important to acknowledge “awkward truths about how we have ended up with such violence in the first place” (Moaveni, 2019). Deep-rooted causes, structural issues, and policies (domestic and foreign policies) have to be examined, and solutions to these need to be found. Legacies of colonization need to be dealt with, and in the present milieu, neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism as well. These legacies have had a particularized impact on women. Policies that seek to deal with these challenges by imposing generic language and ideas (Moaveni, 2019) will not be effective and may aggravate the isolation and marginalization of communities or groups they are targeted at. A more inclusive and positive media representation of marginalized groups, especially women, is also desperately needed to counter the ISIS narrative that Muslims are being globally persecuted.

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Evidence-based studies show that moving away from purely theological approaches for intervention work has proven more effective in addressing personalised vulnerabilities, particularly for countering Islamist extremist radicalisation. This means more involvement at the local and grassroots level, with a broad set of actors such as youth organisations, women’s and human rights organizations, LGBTQI communities, and governments actively participating in dialogue and initiatives. The coming together of these communities with a broader range of issues—what has commonly become known as ‘intersectionality’—is crucial to an informed and effective approach to counter-terrorism measures regarding a group such as ISIS and their recruitment of women.

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The fact that researchers have found that the push and pull factors do not greatly differ for men and women when joining ISIS is crucial. Socially and culturally, there exists a gender-bias when viewing what is or is not acceptable for women. Certain constructs are deemed more acceptable for women, and we often think of women in those terms too: caring, nurturing, amenable, self-sacrificing, inter alia. It therefore becomes impossible even to entertain the idea that women might find militancy and violence attractive. This is why gender-mainstreaming is crucial and needs to be the cornerstone for finding solutions, where there has to be an integration of a gender equality perspective at all stages and levels of policies, programmes, and projects, and assessing how it impacts both women and men. Regarding counterterrorism, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released a brief titled Mainstreaming Gender in Terrorism Prevention Projects in 2020. It outlines certain guidelines and procedures concerning “mainstreaming a gender perspective in developing programmes and projects to assist Member States in implementing international instruments related to the prevention of terrorism, the relevant Security Council resolutions, and the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy” (2020). This brief is in keeping with the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution 68/178 (2013) and resolution 72/194 (2017). These two UNGA resolutions contain provisions on gender-mainstreaming the criminal justice responses considering the principles of equality and non-discrimination.

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The two UNGA resolutions then pave the way towards thinking of counter-terrorism strategies through the lens of international human rights law. The United Nations Security Council’s (UNSC) Resolution 2178 was adopted by consensus on 24th September 2014 in the United States of America (USA), particularly with regards to ‘Foreign Terrorist Fighters’ or FTFs. The resolution highlights that “a complete disregard of human rights is not always helpful from a security perspective” (Ginsborg, 2018)—though it is not without its own problems, and the complexities the resolution poses cannot be addressed comprehensively in this paper.

?Lisa Ginsborg (2018) states that the UN Security Council, through resolution 2178 under Chapter VII of the Charter, explicitly acknowledged for the first time that “giving weight to long-sighted preventive and human-rights friendly approaches to counter-terrorism” (Ginsborg, 2018) might be more beneficial. The resolution calls upon member states to

engage relevant local communities and non-governmental actors in developing strategies to counter the violent extremist narrative that can incite terrorist acts, address the conditions conducive to the spread of violent extremism, which can be conducive to terrorism, including by empowering youth, families, women, religious, cultural and education leaders, and all other concerned groups of civil society and adopt tailored approaches to countering recruitment to this kind of violent extremism and promoting social inclusion and cohesion. (quoted in Ginsborg, 2018, emphasis mine)

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Following resolution 2178 in 2014, the UN Security Council adopted resolution 2242 on women, peace, and security on 13th October 2015. Paragraphs 11, 12 and 13 of resolution 2242 are crucial in terms of developing counter-terrorism strategies that are gender-sensitive. Paragraph 13 echoes directly, in human rights terms, that there is a need to address

the empowerment of women, youth, religious and cultural leaders, the conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism and violent extremism which can be conducive to terrorism, consistent with the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy — A/RES/60/288, welcomes the increasing focus on inclusive upstream prevention efforts and encourages the forthcoming Secretary-General’s Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism to integrate women’s participation, leadership and empowerment as core to the United Nation’s strategy and responses, calls for adequate financing in this regard and for an increased amount, within the funding of the UN for counterterrorism and countering violent extremism which can be conducive to terrorism, to be committed to projects which address gender dimensions including women’s empowerment. (UNSC Resolution 2242, 2015)

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Resolution 2242, however, is soft law and not binding on states, unlike resolution 2178 which was passed under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter and therefore is binding on states. These resolutions (2178 and 2242), however, highlight the growing consensus of late that human rights violations could be potential factors or triggers contributing to the appeal of militancy and terrorism. In particular, the denial of “political rights, poverty or social and economic marginalization” (Ginsborg, 2018) has shown a link between such denial of rights and the rise in violent extremism. The promotion of human rights to countering violent extremism (CVE) is in line with the United Nations Global Counter-terrorism Strategy. It includes the promotion of equality between men and women for the effective enjoyment of cultural, social, economic and political rights. This improvement in gender equality is increasingly coming to be seen as the cornerstone of long-term strategies for terrorism prevention that can be sustained in the long run.

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6. Conclusion

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This paper has been based on recent studies incorporating actual interviews and narrative accounts of women ISIS-returnees and those who are in refugee camps. These interviews and narratives show that “there was not one story of ISIS women, but many separate stories, bound together by one truth – the ease with which jihadist militancy could exploit women’s frustrated hopes and desires” (Moaveni, 2019). The extremist worldview and experience offered by ISIS is seen as highly empowering by some women, as shown in the discussion of push and pull factors. This empowerment and agency lead to a paradoxical rebellion by these women who join ISIS as foreign fighters, often called ‘jihadi brides,’ a term problematised by gender analysts for infantilising these women and making them out to be na?ve when they do wield agency. This all-encompassing narrative by ISIS, and other extremist and terrorist groups, needs equally empowering counter-narratives. To challenge such a worldview adequately and sensitively, a detail-oriented perspective is required of the ideological factors and acknowledging real-world factors and issues that bring about the extremist recruitment of women in the first place. The importance of intervention work that addresses gender mainstreaming is increasingly coming to be seen as instrumental in combating Islamist extremist radicalisation by groups such as ISIS, as well as addressing personalised vulnerabilities. International platforms are endorsing approaches that combine international human rights law with counter-terrorism strategies as the way forward.

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