Female suicide bombing

Claudia Brunner

Chapter 29 in Handbook on Gender in World Politics, 2026, pp 187-192 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Looking back at the majority of scholarship about gender aspects of suicide terrorism, we have reached a cognitive deadlock of redundant stereotyping that starts from and often ends up in embedded feminism in the larger context of Eurocentrist and Occidentalist counter-terrorism expertise. This needs to be challenged by feminist analyses that focus on the core of their competences, the public–private divide, that is so important in the delicate debate about (il-)legitimate violence at large. I believe that feminist terrorism studies remain an oxymoron as long as they are clearly situated in the imperial framework of power and knowledge that dominates them today. This involves looking not only at femininity and masculinity, but also at the androcentrism, heteronormativity and masculinism in the field of IR and at its complicities with the Eurocentrism, Occidentalism and persistent coloniality in both politics and academia. It is within this context that women become suicide bombers, and it is these very same power relations that shape our knowledge about and our remedies against it. Therefore, a feminist gender approach to IR will have to continue insisting on the manifold entanglements between political violence on the one hand and epistemic violence on the other – and position itself with regard to these circumstances.

Keywords: Suicide Bombing; Terrorism; Political Violence; Women; Anti-Muslim Racism; Agency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781803923765
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