Dr Sofia Patel

Department of War Studies/School of Security Studies, King’s College London

Mentor: Rebekka Friedman, Reader (Associate Professor) in IR

Project title: Contesting Counterterrorism: Constructing women through Britain’s post-9/11 policy and practice

Women have long been involved and continue to participate in terrorism across a range of roles, and for a variety of reasons. Even so, prevailing counterterrorism policy responses do not consider the complex ways women are recruited into or motivated to participate in terrorism and the gendered design and outcomes of counterterrorism responses remain poorly understood by policymakers and practitioners. As a result, existing counterterrorism policy and practice integrating women presents a ‘gendered paradox of inclusion’ where efforts to be inclusive of women’s perspectives and experiences seem to have resulted instead in the (re)production of new modes of exclusion. The proposed project, Contesting Counterterrorism: Constructing women through Britain’s post-9/11 policy and practice, will analyse how the gendered paradox of inclusion emerges in relation to Britain’s longstanding counterterrorism strategy CONTEST, will show how these modes of exclusion manifest in various ways and will examine the impact of gendered strategies of inclusion of women on the strategy itself and the women and communities involved. Using feminist institutional tools and discourse analysis this research will reveal how gender has been considered and implicated in the UK government’s multi-departmental counterterrorism policies and practices over twenty years.

Research Area (1-6): RA5: Global Order and Security

Publications (selected)

Peer reviewed articles

Book Chapters:

Reports and briefings:

Twitter: @laramimi