“Sex, lies and videotapes”: female political violence and the denial of individuality in Pakistan

In the last twenty years, suicide attacks has become the favoured repertoire of political violence by Jihadist militants. Whenever such attacks occur, media and academics alike tend to focus and speculate on the individual motivations of the perpetrators. Their reading usually oscillates between an understanding of Jihadist violence as a result of, on the one hand, a hyper-individualization and highly intimate motives or, on the other hand, of a blind submission to authority. This paper departs from such motivations-focused analyses and turns the question upside down in order to interrogate instead the very logic of attributing motivations to others. Ascribing motives to militants is in itself a political process: it is fully embedded in power relations, in the broader imperatives of counter-terrorist policies, and in context-specific “moral panics”. I am particularly interested in both identifying the discursive entrepreneurs — the state security apparatus of course but not only — and elucidating the specific frame used to describe Jihadists’ motivations: the tension individualization/de-individualization mentioned above. My demonstration is based on a case study, that of a young woman who was arrested after a foiled suicide attack orchestrated by the Islamic State in Lahore, Pakistan, in 2017. The empirical material gathered (her confessional video and TV interview) enables me to analyse how militants adapt to, but at times also manage to resist and challenge, the denial of agency imposed upon them.