General

From Nazis to ISIS: Women’s Roles in Violence

April 30, 2017



History Can Aid Understanding of Gender in Conflict

Nisaa Network – From the Nazi regime of the 1940s through the Islamic State of today’s Middle East, an obscured element of history runs though the phenomenon of violent extremism: the participation of women. Contrary to the classic image of women as victims or, at least more recently, peacemakers, new research shows how women can stoke, support and sometimes directly join in violent action, scholars said in a discussion at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Understanding the little-examined role of women in radical, religious-oriented movements or in a state liquidating a minority group, may be a key to deterring such violence, they said.

“Too often our stereotypical portrayal of women as peaceful and men as violent harkens to our age-old tendency to divide the world into simple binaries —masculine-feminine; protector-protected; combatant-caregiver,” said Kathleen Kuehnast, the director of gender policy and strategy at USIP. As a result, she said, “the complex gender relationships that actually socialize violence into our everyday lives—and thus our interventions to end violence—often lack nuance and the test of reality.”

As students of the Holocaust, ISIS and the Afghan Taliban, as well as the earlier struggle in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion of the 1970s, the three scholars in the March 1 discussion identified some common elements of women’s participation. In each, women felt their role in the world enlarged by becoming part of an organization with historic objectives. Generally, even within stereotypical gender roles such as clerks and nurses, women had important support tasks and were sometimes encouraged to act on their own initiative. Finally, women were socialized to accept violence in the same way as men, with mechanisms such as the religious narratives constructed by leaders or the demonization of a group as infidels or dangerous inferiors.