Female Terrorist in Paris: Trend or Outlier? College of Charleston Expert Speculates

College of Charleston Urban Studies Program Director and Political Science Professor Kevin

Bird’s eye view of Paris, photo courtesy of acidcow.com.

Keenan’s most recent publication, titled, “Gender Aspects of Terrorism in Urban Spaces,” has become uncannily relevant in light of the January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. The paper, which analyzes themes within the study of terrorism and women’s rights movements, was published in the July 2014 journal Historical Social Research. The paper’s finding fuels Keenan’s interest in the revelation that a woman may have been an accomplice in some of the attacks.

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“There was an additional layer of sensationalism surrounding the attacks because the media thought a woman was a complicit assailant,” Keenan said. “It shows that a woman executing terrorism still has shock value, which reveals both our own assumptions about who enacts violence as well as the realities of gender structures.”

In some ways, though, it makes sense that women would be enlisted as agents of terrorist organizations. “Terrorism is a weapon of the weak,” Keenan said, and women are often relatively disempowered in terroristic societies, with limited independence and few personal rights.

Some terrorist cells, however, are using the perceived weakness of women to their advantage. “Increasingly you’re seeing women participating in terrorism. That could be a result of increased policing of men who are suspected of terrorism, because police view men as the perpetrators of terrorism. To get around that, terrorists may be encouraging women to become attackers; they’re accepting women into these male-dominated cultures,” Keenan explained.

France, in particular, has proved an example of this not only in the recent attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the hostage situation in the kosher market Hyper Cacher and the shooting of a policewoman, but also in the longer-term recruitment of young Muslims to join Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq. French news outlet Le Figaro estimates between 100-150 French women and children have left France to join the Islamic State.

While Keenan’s paper focuses on the western women’s rights movements, he believes many observations can apply to understanding the evolution of terrorism studies as well. “You have the proverbial ‘other half’ that feels, and is, relatively disempowered. They are not necessarily at the stage of demanding rights, but are rather demanding that the people they view as oppressors step aside.”

Keenan continued, saying, “The obvious difference is that gender rights movements have generally not been conflated with violence, although a very small number of such people may have been violent in the past. With terrorism, people mistakenly apply the values of a small group of violent people with much larger nonviolent groups. This likely reflects the difference of cultural context and interpretation.”

Whether female terrorists, and women and girls joining the Islamic State, represent a long-term trend or an unusual anomaly remains to be seen. Keenan suspects that women will remain a relatively small portion of actual terrorists: “I think that the enactment of violence is part of a much broader reassertion of traditional gender roles, with men in dominant positions. This requires exclusivity, even though in some cases, for effectiveness of an attack, women may be involved directly as terrorists. What I think is much more likely is that women will play roles in facilitating terrorism through social networks of material and other forms of support.”

To learn more about Keenan’s paper, or to read his other work on urban terrorism and gender’s impact on terrorism preparedness, email him at keenank@cofc.edu.