The Women ‘Behind’ the Mujahidin Eastern Indonesia: Negotiating Agency and Gender Dynamics

Abstract

Since 2015, the Mujahidin of Eastern Indonesia (Mujahidin Indonesia Timur, MIT), a Poso-based terrorist group, has had active female members. By July 2020, a total of seven women were convicted on terrorism charges. These include the country’s first three female fighters, the wives of MIT’s top leaders, who were trained to use guns and run guerrillas in Gunung Biru, a forested mountainous area above Poso City. By using the biographical narratives of four female MIT members, this article discusses how female jihadis negotiated their agency and navigated life pathways before and after joining the MIT group. This study employs an ethnographic approach, including participant observation and in-depth interviews with informants conducted in Poso (2019 and 2021) and Bima (2021). Our fieldwork found that most women grew up in moderate Muslim families, then turned to adopt extremist ideology in their late adolescence, and subsequently intensified their ideology before and after marriage. Although their ‘active role’ within the MIT group was a consequence of their engagement with male jihadists through marriage, it does not mean the absence of agency. We argue that these women were not just passive ‘extensions’ of their husbands but exercised their own agency by negotiating gender relations. They actively embraced a more radical Islamism, chose to get involved with MIT, and, after serving time in prison, they reshaped their own life trajectories. Two of them eventually started a new life by leaving Poso’s extremist network, while the other two opted to stay but repositioned their roles within the group.