Alice Martini

Making women terrorists into “Jihadi brides”: an analysis of media narratives on women joining ISIS

ABSTRACT Although the involvement of women in terrorist activities is not new, it is still considered to be an exceptional phenomenon. The figure of a woman militant contradicts the main gender constructions and thus produces a certain shock and disconcertment in societies. In the case of “Jihadism”, women who willingly join a terrorist organisation also challenge the Western Neo-Orientalist perspective on Muslim women in the West. Starting from these theoretical standpoints, this article focuses on a group of terrorists who have recently received a great deal of attention: ISIS women jihadis. Based on a critical discourse analysis of three main UK broadsheets, this article presents, deconstructs and problematises the main depictions that were used to describe these subjects. Furthermore, it discusses how the frames described reconcile these women’s actions with the gender and Neo-Orientalist constructions that circulate in Western societies, safeguarding the deriving hegemonic narratives. In other words, the article focuses on how women terrorists are made into “Jihadi Brides”.

Critical terrorism studies: an introduction to research methods, by Jacob L. Stump and Priya Dixit

capitalism by virtue of international organisations, transnational corporations, and the like. According to the authors’ typology, terrorism is wide enough to encompass disparate groups such as Islamic terrorists, anti-government activists, and Tea Party forces (173). Terrorism from above (i.e., state terrorism) is outweighed in their account. This is purposeful, though, as their goal is to put intraand inter-state terrorism on a par with what is more common agentive corollary vis-à-vis terrorism in the non-state actor (44). Given the Islamic State (IS)’s international rise to power, however, seems to make this imbalance impracticable, if not noteworthy. In a sense, it dates the text, which was published before IS’s rise. What is more, setting modernity as a precondition for terrorism is counterfactual – as if terrorism, as so broadly defined, could not include biblical accounts of the same type. It is perhaps the grandness of the project that hinders a more coherent thesis to be proffered in the end. Kant understood progress to be marked by the degree to which new categories can be developed to better articulate our world. What we have here, unfortunately, is a case of categories gone wild. Almost a third of the nearly 400-page work is devoted to definitional and typological features of terrorism, laden with overly complicated literature reviews to inform their methodological approach to defining and creating a typology of terrorism. The authors would have been well advised had they constructed a more modest approach to linking premodern thought with modern political terrorism.