UC Riverside

Using 280 case files of women involved in terrorism between 1970 and 2018, this dissertation proposes an operationalized definition of a grievance and then employs this definition to analyze the direct and indirect effects of grievance presence, quantity, and type of women’s durations of involvement and lethality in terrorism. In the first empirical chapter, I (1) develop a conceptualization and operational schema that takes into account the theoretical variation identified above, as well as any additional variation that exists in my data; (2) describe the variation in types of grievances that exist in my sample and (3) identify any clustering of grievance types in my data. In the second chapter, this study quantitatively assesses if grievance quantity, grievance type, and biographical availability influence women’s durations of involvement in violent extremism. Findings indicated that while the type or quantity of grievances are not significant influences on the duration of involvement in VE, having at least one grievance increases women’s persistence in terrorism. Moreover, matrimony and motherhood were not found to significantly influence this relationship; however, having less than a high school education increased the effect that having a grievance had on duration of involvement in VE. Employment was found to be a barrier to women’s persistence in VE. Chapter 3 examines the roles grievances play in women’s lethality during VE involvement. Informed by the political approach to Collective Violence Theory (Aya 1979), by using logistic regressions with robust standard errors to evaluate the direct relationships between the presence of any grievance on lethality, the number of grievances and lethality, and PCVT grievances on lethality as well as the moderating influence of PCVT grievances and the relationship between VE ideology and lethality. Results indicate that the presence of any grievance and the quantity of grievances each subject has do not influence lethality. However, PCVT grievances both directly and indirectly increase lethality. The fourth chapter provides concluding thoughts, limitations, areas of future research, and public policy implications of this work.