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Women 's Role For Terrorism Essay

Decent Essays

Women who choose to engage in terrorism have been the subjects of a growing body of literature. The approach and focus of which has been varied, including contributions from a range of academic fields. Gender is significant to understanding female violence because it is atypical to the traditional conceptualisation of violence and war. There is an obvious juncture in the feminist understanding of this topic as identified by Jacques and Taylor (2009). For them, there are two distinct ways that female terrorists and the intrinsic link to gender have been understood (Jacques and Taylor, 2009: 505). On one hand, there are those that view a women’s role in terrorism as strategic. It is seen as an effective tactic as it exploits the target states’ gender stereotypes (Laster and Erez, 2015, Bloom, 2005). Nacos (2005) views the narratives attributed to female terrorists as a tactical choice used to exploit the target state’s inherent gender biases to further terrorist agendas (2005: 448). The main purpose of this work is to encourage policy makers to take these depictions into account when creating counter terrorism measures and to be aware of the use of females as a tactic. This is similar to the work of O’Rourke (2009) who endeavours to show the strategic benefits of female suicide terrorism. Through the comparison of terrorist groups that both have and don’t have women among their ranks, she highlights the strategic advantages of employing women (O’Rourke, 2009: 684). From

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