While the roles and activities of foreign, Islamic State-affiliated women have garnered significant attention, the experiences of local civilian populations have been largely overlooked. Dr Gina Vale’s new book, The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State (Oxford University Press, 2024) exposes the group’s intragender stratified system of governance.

Eligibility for the group’s protection, security, ‘citizenship’, and entrance into the (semi-)public sphere was not universal, but required convergence with IS’s gender norms, through permanent erasure or at least temporary disguise of certain markers of difference. In some cases, this was directed by a premeditated ‘divide and conquer’ strategy; in others, this manifested as unregulated violences at the hands of individual group members, including women. Through first-hand accounts of local Sunni Muslim and Yazidi women, Vale argues that the presence, exclusion, and victimisation of local female civilians were necessary to the functioning and legitimation of IS’s caliphate project, and the supremacy of affiliated men—and women. Though far from represented or protected, Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish women were by no means forgotten.

The consequences of the group’s gendered violences and fragmentation of local communities continue to pose significant challenges in the post-occupation context. However, even within local and international-led efforts to achieve justice and security, the voices and concerns of civilian women have once again become overshadowed.

SPEAKER

Dr Gina Vale is a Lecturer of Criminology in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Southampton. She is also an Associate Fellow of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) and a Member of the Vox-Pol Network of Excellence. Her research takes a feminist, intersectional approach to studying terrorism and extremist violence, primarily focusing on terrorist governance and the organisational roles and experiences of women and children. She is the author of The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State (Oxford University Press, 2024, forthcoming), and has published in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Small Wars & Insurgencies, Conflict, Security & Development, and the Journal of Human Trafficking, Enslavement and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence, among others.

DISCUSSANT

Dr Balsam Mustafa is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow and Lecturer in Translation Studies at Cardiff University. She is the author of Islamic State in Translation: Four Atrocities, Multiple Narratives (Bloomsbury Academic). Currently, she is working on her second book, which explores Cyberfeminism in the Arabic-speaking world.

MODERATOR

Dr Inga Kristina Trauthig is the head of Research of the Propaganda Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her PhD in Security Studies from King’s College London, where she is a visiting scholar with the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies (IMES).