Unveiling Gendered Terrorism: Why Western Women Joined ISIS

Abstract

In June 2014, the world saw the dramatic rise of a radical Islamic terrorist group—the Islamic State—upon Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s declaration of a modern Caliphate for all Muslims to reside. Corresponding with the establishment of ISIS, 550 Western women flocked to join the Islamic State, particularly from June 2014 to December 2015 when ISIS experienced its peak. I aim to understand this enigmatic, seemingly irrational phenomenon. I employ the broader rational choice theory’s concept of utility functions, but I distinguish those for women from those for men. Based on the assumption that ISIS recruiters had a theory of mind about their target audience, I contribute a unique dataset of rhetorical appeals from Dabiq magazine, one of the weapons in the Islamic State’s propaganda arsenal. I examine the qualitative content of the magazine and then quantify the frequency of seven categorical appeals recruiters made to men and women separately. The aim of this analysis is to elucidate what messages recruiters believed would resonate with their readership in the West. The findings from this analysis provide evidence to support the claim that ISIS recruiters believed Western women and men were motivated by disparate desires. Recruiters held the conviction that women primarily sought out avenues to fulfill their religious obligations but also wanted to satisfy their familial duties of marriage and motherhood. Contrastingly, recruiters surmised that religion was, by and large, the primary motivating factor for men. For these reasons, in order to counter terrorist efforts by ISIS and extremist groups like it in the future, we must examine catalysts of radicalization through a gendered lens.