Research Seminar: Sarah Gharib Seif (School of IR) “Beyond the ‘Jihadi Bride’”

In 2015, the ‘phenomenon’ of women traveling to join the Islamic State seemed to have taken over the news, with regular mentions of disbelief of why they would decide to leave their ‘ideal’ Western lives to join a ‘barbaric’ terrorist group. Various attempts to engage with the roles these women have played (and media coverage of it) has focused on a shallow interpretation of agency (and its perceived presence or not), and depictions thereof. Moreover, much of the existing literature on women involved in terrorism not only focuses on the personal, but it treats the women themselves as the challenge for the existing parameters and policies set by the state, whilst simultaneously avoiding how these policies are inherently gendered. This project seeks to move beyond this binary to interrogate how dominant state actors have been complicit in the creation of specific narratives around the women who joined IS. This project seeks to investigate how both media and government actors in the Anglosphere, with a particular focus on the UK, continue to create and perpetuate racialised and gendered narratives about these women in a manner which continues to sustain the dominant cultural order. Through postcolonial, decolonial, feminist, and critical race theoretical positionings, this project seeks to assess the role of the media and the government in othering these women through discourse and practice, based on long-standing colonial, racialised, and gendered perceptions of ‘us’ vs. ‘Other’.