Terrorism

Citation:

Munro, Brenna. 2016. “Locating ‘Queer’ in Contemporary Writing of Love and War in Nigeria.” Research in African Literatures 47 (2): 121–38.

Author: Brenna Munro

Abstract:

Topics: Armed Conflict, Combatants, Child Soldiers, Gender, Men, Boys, LGBTQ, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Non-state armed groups, Race, Sexual Violence, Male Perpetrators, Rape, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, SV against men, Terrorism Regions: Africa, West Africa Countries: Nigeria

Year: 2016

Citation:

Berry, Kim. 2003. “The Symbolic Use of Afghan Women in the War on Terror.” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 27 (2): 137-160. 

Author: Kim Berry

Abstract:

This article analyzes the critical omissions and misrepresentations that accompanied the Bush administration claims that the war on terror waged in Afghanistan was "also a fight for the rights and dignity of women." The article incorporates the insights of Afghan and U.S. analysts, activists, and journalists, along with feminist theorists of Islam and the politics of representation, in order to problematize this characterization of a liberatory U.S. military action. Without such critical analysis, the article argues that we run the risk of using Afghan women as symbols and pawns in a geopolitical conflict, thereby muting their diverse needs and interests and foreclosing the possibility of contributing to the realization of their self-defined priorities and aspirations.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Occupation, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Men, Gendered Power Relations, Religion, Rights, Women's Rights, Security, Human Security, Terrorism Regions: Americas, North America, Asia, South Asia Countries: Afghanistan, United States of America

Year: 2003

Citation:

Third, Amanda. 2014. Gender and the Political: Deconstructing the Female Terrorist. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Author: Amanda Third

Abstract:

The female terrorist circulates within contemporary Western culture as an object of fascination and heightened concern. Gender and the Political analyses cultural constructions of the female terrorist, arguing that she operates as a limit case of both feminine and feminist agency. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, this book demonstrates that the development of the discourse on terrorism evolves in parallel with, and in response to, radical feminism in the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Situated at the borderlines between sexuality, threat and abjection, Amanda Third argues that the figure of the female terrorist compels a reexamination of the project of radical politics and the limits of modernity. (WorldCat)

Annotation:

Table of Contents:

1. Conceptualizing terrorism

2. Constructing the terrorist : the threat from within

3. Feminist terrorists and terrorist feminists : the crosswiring of feminism with terrorism

4. Terrorist time : terrorism's disruption of modernity

5. Conjuring the apocalypse : radical feminism, apocalyptic temporality and the society for cutting up men

6. Abjecting whiteness : "the movement", radical feminism, genocide

7. Nuclear terrorists : Patricia Hearst and the (feminist) terrorist family

Topics: Combatants, Female Combatants, Gender, Femininity/ies, Terrorism Regions: Americas, North America Countries: United States of America

Year: 2014

Citation:

Chertoff, Emily. 2017. “Prosecuting Gender-Based Persecution: the Islamic State at the ICC." Yale Law Journal 126 (4): 1050-117.

Author: Emily Chertoff

Abstract:

Reports suggest that Islamic State, the terrorist "caliphate," has enslaved and brutalized thousands of women from the Yazidi ethnic minority of Syria and Northern Iraq. International criminal law has a name for what Islamic State has done to these women: gender-based persecution. This crime, which appears in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has only been charged once, and unsuccessfully, in the Court's two decades of existence. The case of the Yazidi women presents a promising opportunity to charge it again--and, potentially, to shift the lately unpromising trajectory of the Court, which has been weakened in recent months by a wave of defections by former member states. This Note uses heretofore unexamined jurisprudence of the ICC's Pre-Trial Chamber to elaborate--element by element--how the Prosecutor of the Court could charge gender-based persecution against members of Islamic State. I argue that the prosecution of Islamic State would not just vindicate the rights of Yazidi survivors of Islamic State violence. It would help to consolidate an international norm against gender-based persecution in armed conflict--a norm that, until now, international law has only incompletely realized. This Note argues that only by prosecuting the crime of gender-based persecution can international criminal law cognize violence, like the attacks on Yazidi women, that is motivated not just by race, ethnicity, or gender, but by the victims' intersecting gender and ethnic or racial identities. I conclude by reflecting on the role that a series of prosecutions against perpetrators of gender-based persecution might have in restoring the legitimacy of the ailing ICC.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Ethnicity, Women, Gender-Based Violence, International Law, International Criminal Law, Justice, International Tribunals & Special Courts, Race, Sexual Violence, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, Sexual Slavery, Terrorism, Violence Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iraq, Syria

Year: 2017

Citation:

Anker, Elisabeth. 2012. “Feminist Theory and the Failures of Post-9/11 Freedom.” Politics & Gender 8 (02): 207–15. doi:10.1017/S1743923X12000177.

Author: Elisabeth Anker

Abstract:

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, freedom was the dominant term used to describe the United States in national political discourse. It was articulated as sovereign power, unencumbered agency, and military triumph. “Freedom” eventually animated global violence, becoming a justification for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as for substantial increases in state surveillance. A significant body of feminist scholarship has interrogated the discourse of post-9/11 freedom, examining how the call to “free the women of Afghanistan and Iraq” legitimated the push for war (Bhattacharrya 2008; Marso 2007; Mohanty 2008). For these scholars, “freedom” transformed feminist concerns into tools of militarism and imperialism, while worsening living conditions of women across the globe. In this essay, I also examine the discourse of post-9/11 freedom from a feminist perspective, but I ask a different question: How can feminist political theory critique the discourse of American freedom and challenge its trajectory of sovereign and violent state power? In other words, I examine the discourse of Americans upholding their own freedom, rather than their quest to free others, and insist that feminist theoretical arguments are directly relevant to post-9/11 problematics.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Feminisms, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism, Nationalism, Terrorism Regions: MENA, Americas, North America, Asia, Middle East, South Asia Countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, United States of America

Year: 2012

Citation:

Charlesworth, Hilary, and Christine Chinkin. 2002. “Sex, Gender, and September 11.” The American Journal of International Law 96 (3): 600–605. doi:10.2307/3062163.

Authors: Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin

Annotation:

EDITORIAL COMMENT

 "The October 2001 issue of the American Journal of International Law contained several editorials on the international law implications of the hijackings of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath. In one respect these editorials resemble other writings on these events in academic and popular media: questions of sex and gender are largely overlooked. In our view, however, concepts of sex and gender provide a valuable perspective on these devastating actions. We use the term "sex" here to refer to issues about women as distinct biological beings from men, and the term "gender" to encompass social understandings of femininity and masculinity. Although the value of this distinction is much debated among feminist scholars, we find it helpful in this context" (American Society of International Law, 600).

Topics: Gender, Women, Men, Masculinity/ies, Gender Analysis, Femininity/ies, Terrorism, Violence Regions: Americas, North America Countries: United States of America

Year: 2002

Citation:

Bloom, Mia. 2011. Bombshell: The Many Faces of Women Terrorists. London: Hurst Publishers. http://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/bombshell/.

Author: Mia Bloom

Abstract:

The ultimate stealth weapon, female terrorists kill on average four times more people than their male counterparts. But why are more women drawn to terrorism than ever before? Do women volunteer to be terrorists, or are they coerced? Does women’s participation in terrorism have any positive impact on their place in society?

In Bombshell, Mia Bloom seeks to understand what motivates women and to redress the gap in our understanding of women’s roles by interviewing women previously involved in terrorist groups. Bloom provides a unique and rare first-hand glimpse into the psychology, culture and social networks of women who become terrorists. Bombshell takes an in-depth look at women involved in terrorism in Chechnya, Colombia, Germany, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Palestine, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Turkey, the UK, and the USA.

Drawing on primary research and secondary literature, Bloom examines the increasing role of women in terrorism, and considers what it means for the societies from which they come.

(Hurst Publishers)

Keywords: gender studies, terrorism

Topics: Armed Conflict, Combatants, Female Combatants, Gender, Women, Gender Roles, Femininity/ies, Terrorism Regions: Africa, MENA, East Africa, Americas, North America, South America, Asia, Middle East, Southeast Asia, Europe, Central Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, Western Europe Countries: Colombia, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine / Occupied Palestinian Territories, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States of America

Year: 2011

Citation:

Koch, Natalie. 2011. “Security and Gendered National Identity in Uzbekistan.” Gender, Place & Culture 18 (4): 499–518. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2011.583346.

Author: Natalie Koch

Abstract:

Contributing to the growing literature on feminist geopolitics, this article addresses the security discourses employed by the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan's post-independence nation-building process. It examines the ways in which militarism and the ‘culture of war’ are productive of gendered national identities in Uzbekistan, focusing on how the ‘protector–protected’ relationship figures prominently in the Karimov regime's anti-terrorist rhetoric. It does so through a textual analysis of the Andijon uprising and the ‘Day of Memory and Honor’ holiday. It argues that the terrorist threat has been a driving factor in the pervasive militarization of society, but that official responses to state violence in Andijon obscure alternative security concerns of the general population in Uzbekistan – and more specifically those of women. It adds to existing feminist geopolitics literature by expanding it into a new empirical context, while rejecting the assertion that a ‘geopolitical’ analysis necessarily entails a ‘global’ approach.

Keywords: feminist geopolitics, nation-building, militarism, Uzbekistan, Andijon

Topics: Gender, Women, Governance, Post-conflict Governance, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism, Nationalism, Post-Conflict, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Security, Human Security, Terrorism Regions: Asia, Central Asia Countries: Uzbekistan

Year: 2011

Citation:

Fenster, Tovi, and Hanaa Hamdan-Saliba. 2013. “Gender and Feminist Geographies in the Middle East.” Gender, Place & Culture 20 (4): 528–46. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2012.709826.

Authors: Tovi Fenster, Hanaa Hamdan-Saliba

Abstract:

This article aimed to review the research carried out in the Middle East primarily on gender and feminist geography and also on place formation, urban space, movement and mobility in the social and political sciences. This aim turned out to be challenging primarily because of the colonial and post-colonial history of the region that continues to have a profound effect on the development of academic knowledge among Middle Eastern scholars as well as a restricted accessibility to material published inside the Middle East. Despite this, the article primarily focuses on feminist research on Middle Eastern women done by Middle Eastern scholars and published in Middle Eastern journals and books primarily in Arabic (and Hebrew in Israel). However, during the process of reviewing a large variety of articles, book chapters and books that exist on Middle Eastern women, we realized that it is sometimes difficult and rather artificial to review the material with only this division in mind. In the end, we reviewed the literature on gender and feminism in the Middle East mainly highlighting local published research and also briefly referring to research published in the West by both Westerners and local researchers. The article begins with presenting its research methodology. It then analyzes the website and literature review that we carried out on the contexts, frameworks and themes of gender and feminist geography and spatial research in the Middle East with particular attention on the research carried out in Israel/Palestine. We focus on the private–public spheres; migration and diaspora and the veil as key concepts in analyzing the literature in this section. In the last section, we explain the reasons for the limitations on gender and feminist research in geography inside the Middle East and mention some general conclusions.

Keywords: gender, feminism, middle east, veil, private-public spheres, migration-diaspora

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Displacement & Migration, Migration, Forced Migration, Refugees, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Terrorism Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East

Year: 2013