Gender, Agency, and Accountability for ISIS Violence: Public Perspectives from Mosul, Iraq

Abstract

What role does gender play in public perceptions of accountability for terrorist and insurgency-related violence? Our research draws on the case of women in the Islamic State (ISIS) in Mosul, Iraq. We evaluate public opinion regarding punishment of ISIS-affiliated women among residents of Mosul as well as within internal displacement camps outside Mosul. We provide a theoretical framework for explaining how beliefs about women’s agency for violence relative to the justice system’s treatment of women factor into holding women accountable for violence. We find that people who recognize women’s agency favor harsher punishments, especially when the justice system is perceived as failing accountability expectations. Mosul residents, who are both more affirming of women’s agency for violence and dissatisfied with the judicial system’s treatment of women, are more punitive than those in the camps. Our research has implications for whether insurgent women will be allowed to re-enter society or face long-term public stigma and abuse.

Acknowledgments

We thank High Point University University for Sabbatical Research funding for this project, as well as the Editors and Reviewers at Studies in Conflict & Terrorism for their support. Any errors or omissions are ours alone.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

Replication data are available at the Harvard Dataverse Network at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HDOCSE

Notes

1 Jon, Elster, Closing The Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective (London: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Kristen, Kao and Mara R. Revkin, “Retribution or Reconciliation? Post‐Conflict Attitudes toward Enemy Collaborators," American Journal of Political Science 67, no. 2 (2023): 358–73.

2 Laura Sjoberg, “Jihadi Brides and Female Volunteers: Reading the Islamic State’s War to See Gender and Agency in Conflict Dynamics," Conflict Management and Peace Science 35, no 3 (2018): 296–311; Audrey Alexander and Rebecca Turkington, “Treatment of Terrorists: How Does Gender Affect Justice?," CTC Sentinel 11, no. 8 (2018): 24–9; Kao and Revkin, “Retribution or Reconciliation?”.

3 Sjoberg, “Jihadi Brides”; Alexander and Turkington, “Treatment of Terrorists”; Kanisha Bond, Kate Cronin-Furman, Meredith Loken, Milli Lake, Sarah Parkinson, and Anna Zelenz, “The West Needs to Take the Politics of Women in ISIS Seriously,” Foreign Policy 4 (2019); Ora Szekely, “Fighting about Women: Ideologies of Gender in the Syrian Civil War," Journal of Global Security Studies 5, no. 3 (2020): 408–26; Kao and Revkin, “Retribution or Reconciliation?”; Mara R. Revkin, and Kristen Kao, “No Peace Without Punishment? Reintegrating Islamic State “Collaborators” in Iraq," The American Journal of Comparative Law (accepted, forthcoming 2022).

4 Ben Taub, “Iraq’s Post-ISIS Campaign of Revenge,” The New Yorker 17 (2018); Human Rights Watch, “World Report: Iraq,” (2019). https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/iraq

5 Throughout this manuscript, when we refer to female or women, we do so with the understanding of gender rather than biological sex. As such male/female men/women distinctions are grounded in socially constructed perceptions of feminine versus masculine traits and characteristics rather than biological features. See Dara Kay Cohen and Sabrina M. Karim, “Does More Equality for Women Mean Less War? Rethinking Sex and Gender Inequality and Political Violence," International Organization 76, no. 2 (2022): 414–44 for further discussion.

6 Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (New York: Zed Books, 2007); Sjoberg, “Jihadi Brides,”; Caron E. Gentry, “Thinking about Women, Violence, and Agency: A Cluster Introduction,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 14, no. 1 (2012): 79–82.

7 Valerie M. Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad F. Emmett, Sex and World Peace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

8 Kelly Dawn Askin, War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1997); Ruti G. Teitel, Ruti G., Transitional Justice (London: Oxford University Press, 2000); Elster, Closing the Books; Christine Bell and Catherine O’Rourke, “Does Feminism Need a Theory of Transitional Justice? An Introductory Essay," The International Journal of Transitional Justice 1, no. 1 (2007): 23–44; Kristen Campbell, Kirsten, “The Gender of Transitional Justice: Law, Sexual Violence and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia," The International Journal of Transitional Justice 1, no. 3 (2007): 411–32; Daniel Aguirre and Irene Pietropaoli, “Gender Equality, Development and Transitional Justice: The Case of Nepal," The International Journal of Transitional Justice 2, no. 3 (2008): 356–77; Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, 2012, “Advancing Feminist Positioning in the Field of Transitional Justice," International Journal of Transitional Justice 6, no. 2 (2012): 205–28; Catherine O’Rourke, Gender Politics in Transitional Justice (London: Routledge, 2013); Tami Amanda Jacoby, “A Theory of Victimhood: Politics, Conflict and the Construction of Victim-based Identity," Millennium 43, no. 2 (2015): 511–30.

9 Dyan E. Mazurana, Susan A. McKay, Khristopher C. Carlson, and Janel C. Kasper, 2002, “Girls in Fighting Forces and Groups: Their Recruitment, Participation, Demobilization, and Reintegration," Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 8, no. 2 (2002): 97–123; Sjoberg and Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores; Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (University of California Press, 2008); Jakana L. Thomas and Kanisha D. Bond, “Women’s Participation in Violent Political Organizations," American Political Science Review 109, no. 3 (2015): 488–506; Johanna Nilsson and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert. 2013, “ ‘People Constantly Remind Me of My Past… and Make Me Look Like a Monster’ Re-visiting DDR through a Conversation with Black Diamond,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 15, no. 1 (2013): 110–18; Lihi Ben Shitrit, Julia Elad-Strenger, and Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler, “Gender Differences in Support for Direct and Indirect Political Aggression in the Context of Protracted Conflict," Journal of Peace Research 54, no. 6 (2017): 733–47; Marco Nilsson, “Muslim Mothers in Ground Combat Against the Islamic State: Women’s Identities and Social Change in Iraqi Kurdistan," Armed Forces & Society 44, no. 2 (2018): 261–79; Meredith Loken and Anna Zelenz, “Explaining Extremism: Western Women in Daesh," European Journal of International Security 3, no. 1 (2018): 45–68; Marie Berry, War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Nimmi Gowrinathan, Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2021).

10 A similar victim-perpetrator dichotomy can be found in the criminal justice literature (James W. Messerschmidt, Masculinities and Crime: Critique and Reconceptualization of Theory (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1993); Lawrence A. Greenfeld and Tracy L. Snell, Women Offenders (Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1999).) and in the literature on children in conflict (Bernd Beber and Christopher Blattman, “The Logic of Child Soldiering and Coercion,” International Organization 67, no. 1 (2013): 65–104.).

11 On the rise of ISIS see Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016); on ISIS recruitment strategies see Harleen K. Gambhir, “Dabiq: The Strategic Messaging of the Islamic State," Institute for the Study of War 15, no. 4 (2014); James P. Farwell, “The media strategy of ISIS,” Survival 56, no. 6 (2014): 49–55; Jytte Klausen, “Tweeting the Jihad: Social Media Networks of Western Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq," Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 38, no. 1 (2015): 1–22; on the role of women in ISIS see, Anita Perešin, “Fatal Attraction: Western Muslimas and ISIS,” Perspectives on Terrorism 9, no 3 (2015): 21–38; Anita Perešin and Alberto Cervone, “The Western Muhajirat of ISIS," Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 38, no. 7 (2015): 495–509; Sjoberg, “Jihadi Brides,”; and ISIS accountability in general see Human Rights Watch, “Flawed Justice: Accountability for ISIS Crimes in Iraq,” (2017). https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/12/05/flawed-justice/accountability-isis-crimes-iraq#; Kao and Revkin, “Retribution or Reconciliation?”; Revkin and Kao, “No Peace Without Punishment?”.

12 Sjoberg, “Jihadi Brides,”; Bond, Cronin-Furman, Loken, Lake, Parkinson, and Zelenz, “The West,”; Veronica Buffon and Christine Allison, “The Gendering of Victimhood: Western Media and the Sinjar Genocide," Kurdish Studies 4, no. 2 (2016): 176–96; Debangana Chatterjee, “Gendering ISIS and Mapping the Role of Women," Contemporary Review of the Middle East 3, no. 2 (2016): 201–18; Manne, Kate, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Pablo Castillo Díaz and Nahla Valji, “Symbiosis of Misogyny and Violent Extremism," Journal of International Affairs 72, no. 2 (2019): 37–56; Kyle Kattelman and Courtney Burns, “Unpacking the Concepts: Examining the Link between Women’s Status and Terrorism,” Journal of Peace Research 60, no. 5 (2023): 792–806.

13 Gentry, “Women, Violence, and Agency,”; McNay, Lois, Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013).

14 Alexander and Turkington, “Treatment of Terrorists,”

15 Ibid.

16 Rachel Monaghan, Bianca Slocombe, John Cuddihy, and Neale Gregg, “Prosecuting Extremists in the UK: An Exploration of Charging, Prosecution, and Sentencing Outcomes,” CREST (2023). https://crestresearch.ac.uk/resources/prosecuting-extremists-in-the-uk-an-exploration-of-charging-prosecution-and-sentencing-outcomes/

17 Alexander and Turkington, “Treatment of Terrorists,” 27.

18 Mounira M. Charrad, “Gender in the Middle East: Islam, State, Agency," Annual Review of Sociology 37, no. 1 (2011): 417–37.

19 Alice Martini, “Making Women Terrorists into “Jihadi Brides”: An Analysis of Media Narratives on Women Joining ISIS,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 11, no. 3 (2018): 458–77.

20 Chatterjee, “Gendering ISIS,”

21 Ibid., 202.

22 Ibid., 212.

23 Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS (New York: Random House, 2019).

24 Elizabeth Pearson, “Online as the New Frontline: Affect, Gender, and ISIS-Take-Down on Social Media,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 41, no. 11 (2018): 850–74.

25 Amanda N. Spencer, “The Hidden Face of Terrorism: An Analysis of the Women in Islamic State,” Journal of Strategic Security 9, no. 3 (2016): 74–98.

26 Ibid., See also Loken, Meredith, “Noncombat Participation in Rebellion: A Gendered Typology,” International Security 47, no. 1 (2022): 139–70.

27 Rukmini Callimachi and Catherine Porter, “2 American Wives of ISIS Militants Want to Return Home,” The New York Times 19 (2019). https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/us/islamic-state-american-women.html; Simon Cottee, “What ISIS Women Want," Foreign Policy (2016). https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/17/what-isis-women-want-gendered-jihad/

28 Alexander and Turkington, “Treatment of Terrorists,” 25, 27. The final two quotes are from Martini, “Jihadi Brides”.

29 We refer to insurgency in this paper rather than terrorism because we perceive terrorism as primarily a tool that insurgent groups may use but not an end in itself (see Mustafa Coşar Ünal, "Terrorism Versus Insurgency: A Conceptual Analysis," Crime, Law and Social Change 66, no. 1 (2016): 21–57). In our case, the insurgent group in question, ISIS, utilized terrorism to subjugate civilian populations. However, the logic of our hypotheses should have extensions to insurgent movements that rely less on terrorism than ISIS.

30 Robert Ho, Lynne ForsterLee, Robert ForsterLee, and Natalie Crofts, “Justice Versus Vengeance: Motives Underlying Punitive Judgements," Personality and Individual Differences 33, no. 3 (2002): 365–77; James Meernik, 2003, “Victor’s Justice or the Law? JUDGING and Punishing at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia," Journal of Conflict Resolution 47, no. 2 (2003): 140–62; Victor Peskin, “Beyond Victor’s Justice? The Challenge of Prosecuting the Winners at the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda," Journal of Human Rights 4, no. 2 (2005): 213–31; Richard H. Minear, Victors’ Justice: Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

31 Henri Tajfel, Michael G. Billig, Robert P. Bundy, and Claude Flament, “Social Categorization and Intergroup Behaviour," European Journal of Social Psychology 1, no. 2 (1971): 149–78; Miles Hewstone, Mark Rubin, and Hazel Willis. 2002, “Intergroup Bias,” Annual Review of Psychology 53, no. 1 (2002): 575–604; Daniel Balliet, Junhui Wu, and Carsten KW De Dreu, "Ingroup Favoritism in Cooperation: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 140, no. 6 (2014): 1556; Michal Bauer, Christopher Blattman, Julie Chytilová, Joseph Henrich, Edward Miguel, and Tamar Mitts, “Can War Foster Cooperation?," Journal of Economic Perspectives 30, no. 3 (2016): 249–74.

32 Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001); John Braithwaite, Restorative Justice & Responsive Regulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Daniel W. Van Ness, and Karen Heetderks Strong, Restoring Justice: An Introduction to Restorative Justice (London: Routledge, 2014); Helena Cobban, Amnesty after Atrocity?: Healing Nations after Genocide and War Crimes (London: Routledge, 2015).

33 Peter Raynor and Gwen Robinson, Rehabilitation, Crime and Justice (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005) Gwen Robinson and Iain D. Crow, Offender Rehabilitation: Theory, Research and Practice (New York: Sage, 2009).

34 Andrew Von Hirsch, Doing Justice: The Choice of Punishments (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1976). John M. Darley and Thane S. Pittman, “The Psychology of Compensatory and Retributive Justice,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 7, no. 4 (2003): 324–36; Kevin M. Carlsmith and John M. Darley, “Psychological Aspects of Retributive Justice,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 40, no. 1 (2008): 193–236.

35 John M. Darley, Kevin M. Carlsmith, and Paul H. Robinson, “Incapacitation and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment,” Law and Human Behavior 24, no. 6 (2000): 659–83.

36 Franklin E. Zimring, The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Roger Hood and Carolyn Hoyle, The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

37 Jeremy M. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Ben Oppenheim, Abbey Steele, Juan F. Vargas, and Michael Weintraub, “True Believers, Deserters, and Traitors: Who Leaves Insurgent Groups and Why," Journal of Conflict Resolution 59, no. 5 (2015): 794–823.)

38 Kao and Revkin, “Retribution or Reconciliation?,”

39 Sjoberg and Genrty, Mothers, Monsters, and Whores,; Bell and O’Rourke, “Transitional Justice?,”; Campbell, “Gender,”; Ní Aoláin, “Advancing Feminist Positioning," among others.

40 Sarah Elizabeth Parkinson, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-risk Mobilization and Social Networks in War,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 3 (2013): 418–32; Thomas and Bond, “Women’s Participation,”; Loken and Zelenz, “Explaining Extremism,”.

41 Reed M. Wood, Female Fighters: Why Rebel Groups Recruit Women for War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

42 Sjoberg and Genrty, Mothers, Monsters, and Whores,; Laura Sjoberg, Women as Wartime Rapists: Beyond Sensation and Stereotyping (New York: NYU Press, 2016). Manne, Down Girl,; Loken, Meredith, Milli Lake, and Kate Cronin-Furman, “Deploying Justice: Strategic Accountability for Wartime Sexual Violence,” International Studies Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2018): 751–64.

43 Manne, Down Girl,; Pablo Castillo Díaz and Nahla Valji, “Symbiosis of Misogyny and Violent Extremism,” Journal of International Affairs 72, no. 2 (2019): 37–56. Kattelman and Burns, “Unpacking the Concepts,”.

44 We acknowledge that our framework simplifies possible contingencies and complexities regarding the nature of agency as well as potential cognitive dissonance with respect to affirming or denying such agency (affirmation in some contexts but denial in others). However, our goal here is to establish a generalizable theoretical framework where future research can identify and unpack additional scope conditions and contingencies. See ­appendix for further discussion.

45 In the appendix we propose a broader range of factorial relationships between personal beliefs about women and men’s agency for violence (affirming/denying) and the justice system’s affirmation/denial of agency, some of which is beyond the scope of this manuscript to evaluate.

46 On cognitive dissonance theory, see Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1962); Joel Cooper, “Cognitive Dissonance Theory,” Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology 1 (2012): 377–97.

47 Constitution of Iraq. 2005. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Iraq_2005.pdf?lang=en; Noga Efrati, “Negotiating Rights in Iraq: Women and the Personal Status Law," The Middle East Journal 59, no. 4 (2005): 577–95. Nadje Al-Ali, “Reconstructing Gender: Iraqi Women between Dictatorship, War, Sanctions and Occupation,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 4–5 (2005): 739–58. Nadje Al-Ali, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (New York: Zed Books, 2007). Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt. 2010. What Kind of Liberation?: Women and the Occupation of Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Mishkat Al-Moumin, Constitutional and Legal Rights of Iraqi Women, Middle East Institute (2007). https://www.mei.edu/publications/constitutional-and-legal-rights-iraqi-women).

48 Belkis Wille, “Iraq: Why ISIS Trials are Robbing Women of their Rights,” Human Rights Watch (2017). https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/12/05/iraq-why-isis-trials-are-robbing-victims-their-rights; Human Rights Watch, “World Report: Iraq,”. Human Rights Watch “Flawed Justice: Accountability for ISIS Crimes in Iraq,” (2017). https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/12/05/flawed-justice/accountability-isis-crimes-iraq.

49 See Taub, “Campaign of Revenge,” for a narrative illustration.

50 Chatterjee, “Gendering ISIS,”; Lisa Davis, “Iraqi Women Confronting ISIL: Protecting Women’s Rights in the Context of Conflict,” Swiss Journal of International Law 22, no. 1 (2016): 27; Belkis Wille, “Iraq’s So-Called “ISIS Families”: Rounded up, Vilified, Forgotten,” Human Rights Watch (2018). https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/11/14/iraqs-so-called-isis-families-rounded-vilified-forgotten; Sophia Jones and Christina Asquith, “Iraq is Tempting Fate by Punishing Women,” Foreign Policy (2018). https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/25/iraq-is-tempting-fate-by-punishing-women/.

51 Bond, Cronin-Furman, Loken, Lake, Parkinson, and Zelenz, “The West,”.

52 Mia Bloom and Ayse Lokmanoglu, “From Pawn to Knights: The Changing Role of Women’s Agency in Terrorism?," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 46, no. 4 (2023): 399–414; Simon Cottee and Mia Bloom, “The Myth of the ISIS Female Suicide Bomber,” The Atlantic 8 (2017).

53 Based on observations of women at ISIS trials by one of the authors as well as discussions with ISIS trial judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys.

54 Taub, “Campaign of Revenge,”; Jones and Asquith, “Tempting Fate,”.

55 Kao and Revkin, “Retribution or Reconciliation?,”

56 Ibid.

57 Kirk Bansak, Jens Hainmueller, Daniel J. Hopkins, Teppei Yamamoto. 2021, “Conjoint survey experiments,” in Advances in Experimental Political Science ed. James N. Druckman, and Donald P. Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 19–41.

58 Katherine Clayton, Yusaku Horiuchi, Aaron R. Kaufman, Gary King, Mayya Komisarchik, Danny Ebanks, Jonathan N. Katz et al, “Correcting Measurement Error Bias in Conjoint Survey Experiments,” American Journal of Political Science 12, no. 2 (2023): 1–11.

59 Elisabeth Jean Wood, “The Ethical Challenges of Field Research in Conflict Zones,” Qualitative Sociology 29, no. 3 (2006): 373–86; Nathan Ford, Edward J. Mills, Rony Zachariah, and Ross Upshur, “Ethics of Conducting Research in Conflict Settings,” Conflict and Health 3, no. 1 (2009): 1–9; Lee Ann Fujii, “Research Ethics 101: Dilemmas and Responsibilities," PS: Political Science & Politics 45, no. 4 (2012): 717–23; Susanna P. Campbell, “Ethics of Research in Conflict Environments,” Journal of Global Security Studies 2, no. 1 (2017): 89–101.

Kate Cronin-Furman and Milli Lake, “Ethics Abroad: Fieldwork in Fragile and Violent Contexts,” PS: Political Science & Politics 51, no. 3 (2018): 607–14.

60 These guidelines had appeared in circulation in various draft stages at the time of our study. American Political Science Association, A Guide to Professional Ethics in Political Science, 3rd ed. (Washington DC, 2022). https://www.apsanet.org/Portals/54/diversity%20and%20inclusion%20prgms/Ethics/APSA%20Ethics%20Guide%20-%20Final%20%20February2022_Council%20Approved.pdf?ver=5mQAFYQz3xLhbd4OkQWg6Q%3d%3d

61 Ibid., 5.

62 Ibid., 6.

63 Ibid., 8.

64 For a similar methodology, see also Kao and Revkin, “Retribution or Reconciliation?”.

65 APSA, “Professional Ethics,” 9.

66 Again see Kao and Revkin, “Retribution or Reconciliation?” whose work pre-dated our own.

67 Focused fieldwork was necessary because Mosul is too underrepresented by conventional nationwide probability surveys.

68 Belkis Wille, “Families with ISIS Relatives Forced into Camps,” Human Rights Warch (2018). https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/04/families-isis-relatives-forced-camps.

69 Ibid.

70 Human Rights Watch, “Flawed Justice,”

71 For further discussion of ISIS religious police, see Aida Arosoaie, Aida, “In the Name of Honour and Freedom: The Sacred as a Justifying Tool for ISIS’ and Secular Violence," Culture and Religion 18, no. 3 (2017): 278–95. For religious discussion of women’s participation in jihad, see David Cook, David, “Women fighting in Jihad? ,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 28, no. 5 (2005): 375–84; Nelly Lahoud, “The Neglected Sex: The Jihadis’ Exclusion of Women from Jihad,” Terrorism and Political Violence 26, no. 5 (2014): 780–802.

72 Kao and Revkin, “Retribution or Reconciliation?”

73 Ibid.

74 See the online appendix for further theoretical discussion of identity-based predictors of punishment preferences.

75 Kao and Revkin, “Retribution or Reconciliation?”.

76 Power calculations, reported in the appendix, indicate sufficient sample size for paired means hypothesis testing.

77 Ibid.

78 Human Rights Watch, “Flawed Justice,”

79 Further testing of Sjoberg’s (2018) three narratives (mother-monster-whore) surrounding women and violence as well as public perceptions of women combatants as “good guys” vs. “bad guys” are fruitful directions for future research.

80 The case of Kurdish women fighters in Rojava could serve as an example See Güneş Murat Tezcür, “A Path Out of Patriarchy? Political Agency and Social Identity of Women Fighters,” Perspectives on Politics 18, no 3 (2020): 722–39.