PhD thesis defence by Anna Malgorzata Rajkowska
This dissertation traces the militant trajectories of Turkish jihadi women. It looks at their lives before, during, and after the territorial collapse of the Islamic State (IS). I argue that women’s participation was a continuation of preexisting networks – cultivated in women-only spaces and extending from earlier militant Islamist traditions, including those in the Afghan and Chechen jihad. By recentering Turkey as one of the pivotal yet neglected nodes in the global jihadi ecosystem, I offer a corrective to Arabocentric academic literature.
I ask three interrelated questions:
- In what ways has Turkish women’s participation in IS built on pre-existing militant Islamist traditions?
- In which ways did women participate in and shape everyday militant life within IS?
- What role do women-only spaces play in shaping women’s pathways to global jihad?
Based on a unique dataset of over 150 Turkish female cases, this study draws on a triangulated methodology: multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork (interviews, focus groups, participant observation), digital ethnography (social media content, martyrdom announcements, online biographies), and thematic analysis of over 2,000 pages of Turkish-language court files and militant Islamist publications. This layered approach allows an in-depth understanding of how Turkish women joined IS not as ideological novices, but agents who actively shaped the dynamic of jihadi policy-making with Turkish-speaking circles.
The dissertation is structured around the themes of historical continuity, mobilisation pathways, gender-segregated spaces, and post-IS trajectories. Drawing on Joan Scott’s concept of gender as a constitutive category of power, I explore how religious symbols, institutional arrangements, normative codes, and subjective identity converged to shape female jihadism as we know of today. By foregrounding women as militants, this study shows how the gendered infrastructures sustain armed ideological projects.
Anna Rajkowska is a Ph.D. candidate at the European University Institute (EUI) and a visiting researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Antwerp, where she is affiliated with the Network on Migration and Global Mobility. As a sociologist, her research examines women’s mobilization into the Islamic State (IS) through gender-segregated spaces, with a particular focus on Turkish jihadi women, based on extensive sources in Turkish. Prior to joining the EUI, she earned her master’s degree in Political Science from the Department of Political Science (Mülkiye) at Ankara University.