Explaining Extremism: Western Women in Daesh

Abstract

Despite deeply conservative and gendered regulation, brutal violence, and widespread coverage of the group’s use of rape, more than 600 women have left Western countries to join Daesh. Researchers explain this recruitment primarily through women’s desire for romantic adventure, deception on social media, and anti-Western sentiment spurred by discrimination and violence in their home states. Using an original dataset of social media activity from seventeen Western female recruits between 2011-2015, we evaluate these arguments and offer a new explanation centered on a religious and political ideology that necessitates a physical hijra (migration) to Iraq or Syria. We find consistent evidence that anti-Western sentiment and ideological commitment drive women’s migration. This finding has valuable implications for counterterrorism policy and security studies, which tend to treat women’s mobilization as separate from general extremism. Our findings suggest female recruits should be taken seriously as motivated insurgents intent on establishing an Islamic caliphate.