LITERATURE REVIEW 5/6 pages
WHAT MOTIVATES INDIVIDUALS TO JOIN TERROR GROUPS?
While terrorism studies tend to explore economic factors, such as poverty, lack of education and lack of employment, personal grievances including revenge, marginalization or government repression, Cottee and Hayward (2011) argue that both negative and positive emotional motivation can play a role in an individual`s decision to join a terror group. The authors suggest that terrorism studies have been mostly focusing on negative emotions such as humiliation and betrayal hate, revenge, intimidation, frustration (Fattah and Fierke, 2009). However, their analysis of positive emotions such as desire for excitement, desire for ultimate meaning and desire for glory might also play a role in individuals motivations to join a terror group.
A number of factors can motivate individuals to join terror groups, from individual-level factors to supply-side factors (Kavanagh 2011). Emotional and psychological attributes as personal and emotional experiences, sociological factors as group peer pressure and the desire to belong, socioeconomic factors as education and economic opportunities, and political factors all collaborate in the examination of individual-level motivations.
Additionally, demand-side factors can affect who is welcomed into a terrorist group, such as selection preferences of terrorist groups (Kavanagh 2011), organizational characteristics (Thomas and Bond 2015), and the mechanisms through which terrorist groups elicit support (Flanigan 2015).
Fattah and Fierke explore emotions on a larger scale and try to explain the way feelings of humiliation and betrayal, especially when narrated in specific ways by Islamist radicals, motivate individuals to engage in terrorism. (Fattah and Fierke 2009). Although providing good insights at the societal level, the argument fails to explain for the variation at the individual level, it is assumed that any individual living in these Muslim societies can experience feelings of humiliation or betrayal, yet not everyone in these societies engage in violent terrorist acts.
DO WOMEN MAKE DIFFERENT DECISIONS WHEN JOINING TERROR GROUPS?
Previous literature has not explored exclusively the relationship between sexual violence and women’s participation in terror groups through a gender perspective. Bloom in Bombshell fails to address a number of questions when discussing sexual violence and women’s participation in terrorism while reducing women to victims, removing them as political agents in the context of their conflict (Bloom 2011). She provides elucidative insights and reports of women’s participation in terror groups such as the Black widows in Chechnya, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, however, gendered analyses of those participation are required in order to understand the relationship between sexual violence and women’s participation in terror groups.
Conflict has been studied through gendered lenses in an effort to build a feminist theory of war in Gendering Global Conflict (Sjoberg 2013). An in-depth gendered perspective is provided while analyzing International Relations and war, sexual violence as a strategy of war, sexual violence as a tactic of war and many other aspects of conflict, however, not the relationship between sexual violence and women’s participation in terror groups.
Wood explores the relationship between armed groups and sexual violence, specifically why the Liberations Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka chooses not to use sexual violence as a terror tactic, yet does not analyze how the sexual violence perpetrated by the state might have influenced women to engage in terror acts (Wood 2009).
Moreover, research has not reached a common agreement on what motivates men or women to commit acts of terror. In most cases, women are portrayed as victims, and few have studied women as perpetrators. Factors such as history, specially grievances, shared experiences, culture of martyrdom, family traditions and coercion have been pointed out as key motivators for individuals that decide to join terror groups (Bloom 2011).
In under what circumstances women join terror groups? Scholars have pointed out three key factors that motivate women to join terror groups, revenge, representation and social role fulfillment. Participating in terror groups allow women to avenge their losses, such as the loss of a family member or diminished access to educational and financial opportunities, gives them a means to protecting their security, as women can be valuable targets for state violence and armed groups (Thomas and Bond 2015).
Women can also challenge cultural prescriptions on the role of women in society and politics by getting involved in violent politics, and at times to challenge social injustices and legal inequities. While all these motivations are real, they do not differ in a significant way from male terrorists. Desire for revenge, representation and social role fulfillment are not exclusive to women terrorists (Thomas and Bond 2015)
Research has shown that the demand-side organizational characteristics, as organization’s preferences, ideologies and aims impact how and when women join violent political organizations. Factors such as group size, recruitment goals can influence the demand for women participants, whether they join willfully or coercively. Women are more likely to participate in groups that use terror tactics, because this gives the group a tactical edge due to gender stereotypes (Thomas and Bond 2015).
Fattah and Fierke (2009) note that acts of betrayal, such as rape, can amplify feelings of humiliation, so this may also be a factor in willingness to join. However, Thomas and Bond (2015) would likely add that feelings of betrayal and humiliation are not unique to women.
Mia Bloom summarizes women’s involvement with terror groups to be motivated by four R’s, revenge, redemption, relationship and respect. Revenge for the death of family members is most often pointed out as a key motivator for women to associate with terrorism. Redemption appears as a way for women to erase past sins, if a woman is in an elicit relationship or has been victim of sexual violence, she is more likely to consider martyrdom an attractive option. (Bloom, 2011).
Women, as men, also seek the respect of their community, and by engaging in terrorist violence they prove that they are just as dedicated and committed to the cause as men. All these motives often coexist. Regardless, all these factors can also be applied to men, once more not explaining exclusively why women engage in terrorism (Bloom, 2011).
Female terrorists have been found to be four times deadlier than male terrorists and for this reason being recruited, coercively or not, by terror groups. Because they can penetrate targets more successfully and have greater propaganda value (Bloom 2015). Female suicide bombers have been reported to be sexually abused by insurgents, and subsequently, stigmatized and recruited (Bloom 2007).
In several cases, women have alleged to have been abused, victimized or targeted. This has created an argument that it leaves them no option other than joining a terror group in a way to reclaim their honor. Therefore, one final R is added to Bloom’s list, for rape. Sexual violence has been reported by women as a motivation to join terror groups, in cases such as the Black widows in Chechnya and Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka (Bloom 2011).
Bloom further describes terrorist women who were victims of sexual violence as victims of the conflict, victims of their attackers and victims of the situation in which they find themselves (Bloom 2011). This denies the possibility that women act from political motivations, and that while men who commit violence can make autonomous decisions, women that do so are controlled or coerced (Gentry and Sjoberg 2015).
Much of the current scholarship on violence in conflict assumes that men are perpetrators and women are victims, including the studies of female fighters. (Cohen, 2013) It is not seemly to blame a woman’s involvement in political violence in men, while war, acts of terrorism and violence might be related to patriarchy, women have choices about their participation. Therefore, women’s action should not be interpreted outside of the realm of their choice and agency, yet these choices are not independent of the gendered social and political context of their local and global worlds (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007).
Although men and women have socially constructed differences, theories of political violence that are applied to men should apply to women, as well as made gender-sensitive. Questioning the narratives of violent women requires comprehending the reasons that allow inaccurate content to remain dominant, and who is benefiting from these stereotypical definitions of women as terrorists (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007).
Narratives of terrorist women usually characterize them as psychologically handicapped and unable to make their own decisions, and also distinguish them from “real” women, contrasting violence and femininity. Through these dual discursive moves, narratives characterizing violent women in global politics as “unreal” deprive women of agency and maintain subordinating stereotypes of women (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007).
Gendered assumptions about political violent women have also had serious policy consequence and resulted in women being largely excluded from several post conflict policy processes. The understanding that women cannot be combatants and the powerful norms about the inherent nonviolence of women have also prevented female fighters from benefiting from demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration programs (Cohen 2013).
Because they have a discursive component, groups are shifting constellations of social actors, depending on the way boundaries of a denoted category are constructed, in this way, constructions of violent women can shift and change with culture and interest (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007).
Recognizing the existence of women’s violence, then, raises the issue if women choose. Gentry and Sjoberg argue that if anyone chooses, then women also choose. Besides, the question about choices is not whether or not they exist, but under what dimensions and constraints they exist. A number of analyses of women terrorists perpetrate gender marginalizing discourses about women’s participation, rather than seeing them through a gender perspective. (Gentry and Sjoberg 2015).
Women’s own focus on political rationale or religious joy intermingled with some personal statements can motivate them to engage in terror acts, however, media accounts focus on personal reasons, such as divorce, rape or adultery (Gentry and Sjoberg 2015). While gendered violence can be among women’s and men’s motivation for the perpetration of some, reducing a women’s motivation for political violence to the personal sphere is problematic. These accounts emphasize women’s motivations for engaging in terrorism as different from men’s, as associated with their femaleness rather than their humanity and as personal rather than political. (Gentry and Sjoberg 2015).
Women’s participation in terror groups is far more complicated than groups who coerce women to join, part of the challenge in understanding women’s motivation is considering if they join terror groups by coercion or choice. Coercion includes community pressure to crude force, gender stereotypes explain partly, occupation and religion explains alternatively. Frequently, the reality is a combination of personal, political and religious factors that are flickered at different moments by different incentives (Bloom, 2011).
In conclusion, understanding that women as terrorist have agency on their choices, even if constrained by sociological norms or narratives, is fundamental in challenging the assumption that victims of sexual violence are motivated or coerced to engage in terror groups. The next section will explore if there is a relationship between sexual violence and women’s participation in terror groups, by analyzing women’s motivation to engage in terror acts through a gendered perspective.
THEORETICAL ARGUMENT 5 pages
How Sexual violence motivates men and women to join terror groups
Violence committed for the purpose or the excuse of providing protection to the state’s feminized others, either in the nation generally or in women specifically. Women’s bodies become the symbol of national identity and pride. These cultural, social and national constructions create a narrative that femininity, purity is that which states defend and that which states must be to defend, in their capacities as masculine protectors, masculine, tough, protecting, militaristic and nationalistic.
Gendered perspectives of conflicts show gender and conflict as co-constituted. Traditional gender roles are indispensable for the
(Sjoberg 2013).