Women who volunteer: a relative autonomy perspective in Al-Shabaab female recruitment in Kenya

ABSTRACT

Notions of relative autonomy shape the discourse on voluntary recruitment of women and girls to terrorist networks. This article discusses voluntariness of women in Al-Shabaab recruitment, using feminist theories of relational autonomy based on an ethnographic study of sixteen selected Al-Shabaab women returnees in Kenya. The study analyses women’s autonomous decision-making in volunteering for the Al-Shabaab network. Women participate on their sheer will independently of religiously inclined cultural values at one end, and on the other end, participation is shaped via gender-dynamics of submission and subordination within families and the community. However, due caution is exhibited in understanding different aspects in autonomous decision-making in volunteering, where some women had joined these networks as a struggle to exercise agency within systems of oppression in patriarchal setups with the lure for emancipation within the Al-Shabaab network and the utopian caliphate.

KEYWORDS:

• Relative autonomy
• recruitment
• women
• terrorism
• Al-Shabaab
• decision-making
• emotions
• emancipation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Legal scholar, Feinberg (1989) explains decision-making of agents as autonomous where individuals make their own decisions wholeheartedly separate from each other.

2. The verse are strongly contested by scholars (Chaudhury, 2008) with regard to the husband-wife relationships. The verses are interpreted in a sense where women are entitled to be well looked after by their husbands, mainly with regard to the financial responsibilities of the family, and women playing an obedient role of serving the husband. She should obey as long as the husband does not disobey Allah. These verses are also used manipulatively in shaping the narratives for the roles of obedient wives, where they have to follow their husbands in decision-making, as the husband knows what is best for the family, which includes what is best for the wife.

3. The word reverted is used for Muslims converts as being reverted back to their religion of birth or the original religion (Islam).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fathima Azmiya Badurdeen

Fathima Azmiya Badurdeen is presently a Lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences, Technical University of Mombasa. Fathima has worked as a researcher in the field of countering violent extremism and peacebuilding in Kenya and Sri Lanka.