Gendercide and terrorism studies

Despite the centrality of gendercide against non-combatant males to terrorists’ aim of achieving political, religious, military, and ideological objectives, the phenomenon has received minimal attention in terrorism studies. Whereas terrorism researchers have underscored that non-combatant males are subjected to gender-based violence in the specific form of sexual violence, the limitation of gender-based violence to sexual violence forecloses us from problematising and comprehending the myriad ways non-combatant males are not invariably perpetrators but victims of gender-based violence beyond the conventional emphasis on sexual violence. This article transcends the existing scholarly preoccupation with sexual violence to critically assess the gender-selective massacres of non-combatant males by terrorists as a strategy to vitiate competition from potential combatants. With masculinity generally framed as a potential threat in conflict situations, terrorists engage in gender-selective massacres of non-combatant males as a tactic in their quest to control communities and territories devoid of opposition. Drawing on the framework of hegemonic masculinity and on twenty-nine (29) phenomenological interviews with survivors and ex-Boko Haram combatants in the conflict-affected northeast Nigeria, I explore the manifestation and rationality of gendercide against non-combatant males in the troubled region where terrorist insurgents have wreaked havoc on communities in an attempt to impose a caliphate where shariah overrides secular politics. This article contributes to terrorism studies by broadening our comprehension of gender-based terrorist violence against non-combatant males beyond the extant theoretical and empirical focus on sexual violence that has been mainly employed to examine gender-based violence against non-combatant males in terrorist insurgencies around the world.