WUNRN
Women Without Borders
SAVE - Sisters Against Violent
Extremism
02. April 2010
The recent bombings in Russia by female suicide bombers should give us all
reason to pause: how is it possible that women—people we count on to hold
together civil society, to be the voice of reason against violence and
aggression, to continue to be mothers, wives, and daughters, even when it’s
most difficult—were the perpetrators of such a deadly attack on civilians in
the heart of Moscow? How do we, as a female counterterrorism platform, respond
to such brutality?
Women have increasingly become part of militant operations worldwide. Female
suicide bombers are highly effective because they do not fit in with
commonly-held ideas about who terrorists are and what they look like. They
easily pass through police checkpoints when others might be stopped, and even
traditional garments from dresses to abayas can help hide the presence of a
discreetly-worn belt of explosives.
What is most striking about these female suicide bombers, which Russian
authorities have presumed to be part of the “Black Widows,” a long-standing
terrorist group from Chechnya, Russia, is that they claim to act for personal
reasons. The “Black Widows” claim to act in response to the murder of their
husbands, sons, and brothers by ethnic Russians. These women are not driven
primarily by religious affiliation or for political gain, although those
factors have certainly played a crucial role in determining the circumstances
under which the Black Widows’ husbands were killed. They were driven by a
desire for revenge—a personal action taken to redress a personal grievance.
Just as “the personal” emotions of grief, anger, loss, and powerlessness led
these women to commit a senseless act against innocent bystanders, so too can
“the personal” lead us to working towards a solution. SAVE seeks to reach out
to women affected by violent extremism, whether it is women affected by the
loss of a family member or friend to a terrorist attack or women who see the people
in her life becoming radicalized by forces within society, to empower them to
respond to these threats through smart power: constructive deterrence. Our
ability to stem the rising tide of violent extremism lies in our ability to
reach women on emotional and cognitive levels and to appeal to their sense of
reason, of hope, of faith in mankind, and to empower these women to respond to
radical forces in non-violent ways.
Radicalization and violent extremism can be born of geopolitical issues, but
they can also be born of personal emotions, including accumulated grief,
humiliation, and despair. At SAVE, we also seek to tap into the personal, but
to achieve an emotional breakthrough, not an emotional breakdown. Strategies
like storytelling and relationship-building over cultural, religious, and
ethnic divides wed the emotional and cognitive together. In these and other
efforts, we try to bring women to a level at which they forge an emotional and
cognitive attachment to non-violence and learn to express their anger, fears,
and concerns in ways that strengthen families and civil society, rather than
tearing them down.
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