Wives imported from the West – the Migration of Western Women to the Islamic State

The paper seeks to answer to the question why more and more Western women decide to migrate to the Islamic State. Its main purpose is to trace the motivations which lead to the abandon of Western democracies for a regime which is oppressive against women The main focus of the paper are women because they get to a completely different situation after the joining of the terrorist organization than they were before the emigration with loosing part of their autonomy. The paper also covers of the role of the media and their social network which have a possible effect on this decision. The main hypothesis about their motivation is that women join to ISIS for the same reasons as men do: namely there are not only personal reasons in the background, as lot of medium assumes, but a political will as well. This hypotheses challenges the victimized ideas of women and the way the media depicts them. As a methodology, it contains two part: first, it gives an overview about the literature of women emigrated to the Islamic State, second it empirically tests the assumed hypothesis through interviews made with returning women. The added value of the research is to get an overview about the common characteristics of emigrated women which can lead to working out of concrete actions. These actions include propositions for the moderation of emigration and stopping the danger of radicalization.