From Beliefs to Actions: What we can learn from a Gendered Study of Violent Radicalization

The presence of women terrorists is not a new reality. From the nineteen century’s anarchist Narodnaïa Volia to todays’ jihadist ISIS, participation of women in terrorist groups has indeed been recorded. The study of the phenomenon itself is however very recent due to substantial bias in the appraisal of women as perpetrators of political violence. For instance, at a time when a lot of attention is put on violent radicalization, there is little to none analysis that focuses specifically on women’s radicalization. As we will demonstrate, it is a problem as it hinders a global appreciation and understanding of the phenomenon of violent radicalization. More precisely, the relationship between non-violent and violent radicalization – one of the most debated issues in the terrorism field nowadays – would in our opinion greatly benefit from a gendered analysis of the processes of radicalization. Due to societal pressures and organizational constraints, women do “experience” radicalization differently than their male counterparts. It influences their relation to violence, and how they conceive the use of violent tactics. As such, analyzing the subjective trajectories of women involved in terrorist groups – not only how these women came to develop “radical beliefs”, but also how they came to transpose these beliefs into acts of violence – may hold the key to understanding the link between non-violent and violent radicalization in general. In order to demonstrate this assumption, we reconstructed the “life stories” of some of the women involved in the Northern Ireland conflict, through personal interviews and second-hand data (media sources, scientific works, etc.). This permitted us, inter alia, to highlight the reflexive dimension of the radicalization process and the importance of reconsidering the meaning of “violence” when its expressions may be constrained by societal gender expectations.