Women who volunteer: a relative autonomy perspective in Al-Shabaab female recruitment in Kenya

Notions of relative autonomy shape the discourse on voluntary recruitment of women and girls to terrorist networks. This article discusses voluntariness of women in Al-Shabaab recruitment, using feminist theories of relational autonomy based on an ethnographic study of sixteen selected Al-Shabaab women returnees in Kenya. The study analyses women's autonomous decision-making in volunteering for the Al-Shabaab network. Women participate on their sheer will independently of religiously inclined cultural values at one end, and on the other end, participation is shaped via gender-dynamics of submission and subordination within families and the community. However, due caution is exhibited in understanding different aspects in autonomous decision-making in volunteering, where some women had joined these networks as a struggle to exercise agency within systems of oppression in patriarchal setups with the lure for emancipation within the Al-Shabaab network and the utopian caliphate.