The Syrian Conflict and “Women Terrorists”

Studies on terrorism have often taken the usual bias towards studying and analyzing phenomena from a male-dominated perspective. The current article looks at jihadi feminism as a growing trend in contemporary terrorism. The paper argues that there is an increase of women from both traditionally Muslim and traditionally non-Muslim regions joining ISIS and taking part in the Syrian war on the side of Islamic extremists. The paper argues that women from Western countries, because of their understanding of feminism, are more combatant in championing religious terrorism than are women who have been brought up in Islamic role, who see their role mainly as that of helper of terrorist activists rather than active participants.

What’s love got to do with it? Framing ‘JihadJane’ in the US press

The purpose of this article is to compare and contrast the US press coverage accorded to female terrorist plotter, Colleen LaRose, with that of two male terrorist plotters in order to test whether assertions in the academic literature regarding media treatment of women terrorists stand up to empirical scrutiny. The authors employed TextSTAT software to generate frequency counts of all words contained in 150 newspaper reports on their three subjects and then slotted relevant terms into categories fitting the commonest female terrorist frames, as identified by Nacos’s article in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (2005). The authors’ findings confirm that women involved in terrorism receive significantly more press coverage and are framed vastly differently in the US press than their male counterparts.