Women, Violence, and the Islamic State

This book explores the self-proclaimed Islamic State’s (IS) perspectives on and violence against women.

Since its inception and subsequent rise to power, the IS has established a reputation of ethnic and religiously motivated intolerance and violence. This book highlights how this also extends to a specific campaign of violence against women - femicide. This femicide includes, but is not limited to, gang rape, detention and torture, sexual enslavement, trafficking, and forced abortions. Importantly, this book reveals that the IS is not executing this campaign of femicide randomly, but rather using sexual violence against women as a tool by which to establish, build, and grow a state. The book implements a human rights framework which recognises violence against women as a violation of their human rights, something which is generally dismissed, and uses first-hand accounts and testimonials to assess the range, depth, and degree of the violence. Overall, the book not only exposes how the IS has deeply interwoven violence against women, to the point of femicide, into its narratives of jihad, the purpose of the caliphate, and IS masculinity, but it also challenges the tendency to marginalize the serious nature of the violence women experience in conflicts globally and, more generally, in their everyday lives.

This book will be of interest to students of gender and security, religious violence, political violence and terrorism, Islamism, and human rights.