How can a Feminist Approach to Understanding the Motives of Terrorists be used to Improve Counterterrorism?

Both conceptually and in practice, counterterrorism efforts have been continuously stunted due to an androcentric understanding of terrorism. As a subject of security, ‘the terrorist’ has become sexed and deemed male, catalysing gendered assumptions of motivation that have constructed misdirected and flawed counterterrorism policies. The purpose of this paper is to de-centre such androcentric understandings that erroneously sustain counterterrorism efforts. Such essential de-sexing of the terrorist subject and its motivations may be precipitated by a feminist standpoint that equips a gender framework, which will constitute as the methodology for this paper. The first section of this paper explores how understandings of terrorist motivations may become diversified through considering the presence of women within terrorist currents in gendered and thus meaningful ways. The second section of this paper interrogates how forms of gendered insecurity function as valid motivators for women to participate within terror. To ensure the conceptual risk of reinforcing the homogenised image of the female terrorist as a helpless victim is inhibited, the final section of this paper explores how women become motivated to engage with terror as a form of autonomised political participation, so that a multidimensional understanding of motivations may be acquired and better inform counterterrorism strategies.