Utilizing the voices and lived experiences of local women, The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State examines the systems of governance and control of the Islamic State (IS) and its protostate. The book complicates prevailing narratives about the “woman in IS,” heretofore focused on either victims or perpetrators. The book introduces nuance in the form of a crucial third category: local civilian women navigating life under IS as everyday subjects, stuck within a deeply stratified system. By giving these women analytical and narrative space, the work resists reductive typologies to demonstrate how IS’s gendered governance shaped their roles, risks, opportunities, and lives. Using an intersectional approach, Unforgotten Women examines how IS structured its governance in ways that systematically differentiated access to rights, resources, and punishments depending on a woman’s identity. Gina Vale’s intervention opens new space for understanding power, agency, and individual experience within the gendered governance of extremist regimes.
The purpose of the work is to demonstrate how IS stratified women’s roles and experience, creating an intragendered hierarchy within its proto-state. The book’s core argument is that unaffiliated women within the Islamic State were “integral to the functioning and legitimation [IS’s] ‘caliphate’” (p. 223) as well as to “supremacy of affiliated men and women” (p. 5). To make the argument, Unforgotten Women follows a sophisticated logical progression grounded in three theoretical traditions: Feminist Security Studies (FSS), Terrorism Studies, and Rebel Governance Literature.
The empirical exploration of IS governance occurs from Chapters 3 to 6, with each focused on a particular aspect: Militaritarization of Society, Law and Order, Goods and Services, and Intervention in Private Life. Chapter 3 examines how IS’s protostate operated as a society at war, where hypermasculine fighters used narratives of “protection” to justify their monopoly on violence while creating strict hierarchies based on gender and Sunni Arab identity that subordinated Kurds and Ezidis. Chapter 4 shows that IS’s judicial system promised “justice, protection, and services’ through a social contract” but created a hierarchical society, demonstrating that, adapting Laura Sjoberg (‘Introduction’, in Laura Sjoberg, ed., Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives, 2009), “secure [proto-]states contain insecure women” (pp. 83–85). Chapter 5 discusses the public services provided by IS, e.g., healthcare and education, as tools for legitimacy and control, a two-tiered system created to favor IS-affiliated members over others (pp. 130–132). Chapter 6 explores how IS extended its governance into the domestic sphere by controlling marriage, reproduction, and family relationships to build its protostate and expand membership. The book concludes that IS deliberately and strategically embedded intersectional hierarchies into its governance practices, both to secure internal cohesion and to legitimate external boundaries. The author emphasizes the importance of nuanced recognition of local civilian women’s roles, both as victims of, and as agents within, IS structures (pp. 217–224). Vale’s chapters progressively reinforce one another. This careful structuring allowing the author to persuasively argue that intersectionality is not just useful but essential for understanding the intricate realities of women’s lives under extremist governance.
Unforgotten Women makes substantial methodological, theoretical, and empirical contributions to the study of rebel governance and FSS. Methodologically, in responding to Cynthia Enloe’s (Bananas, Beaches and Bases Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2014) call to refocus attention on the margins by asking “where are the women?”, the book pushes further by asking “which women are where?” (p. 36), shifting the analytic lens from presence to positionality. Moving beyond dominant framings of “women as terrorists” or “women as victims,” the book provides what Maria Stern (“Racism, Sexism, Classism, and Much More: Reading Security-Identity in Marginalized Sites” in B. A. Ackerly, J. True, and M. Stern, eds., Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, 2006) terms “empirical material that is otherwise silenced or excluded from the authorized subjects of research” (as quoted on p. 218). Theoretically, the book challenges monolithic assumptions about the “woman in IS” by deconstructing this category and reinforcing feminist critiques of the universalized figures of the “beautiful soul” (Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War, 1987), the “non-combatant” (Laura Sjoberg, “Gendered Realities of the Immunity Principle: Why Gender Analysis Needs Feminism,” International Studies Quarterly, 50(4), 2006), and the “female terrorist” (Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry, eds., Women, Gender and Terrorism, 2011, 218–219). Empirically, the study’s foundation—combining testimonies from 63 women with analysis of 625 IS governance documents—represents a significantly civilian-centred examination of insurgent governance. It addresses the critical gap in the field where women’s roles in rebel movements remain “under-researched and less understood” outside the binary of perpetrator/victim (p. 35). The book stands out for its combination of empirical depth and conceptual clarity, offering a model for future research into the gendered nuances of rebel governance at the intersection of feminist theory and conflict studies.
Whilst Unforgotten Women makes important methodological, theoretical, and empirical contributions, two significant limitations warrant attention. The first involves the author’s (non-)engagement with decolonial, postcolonial, and Global South feminist theories. Although the book briefly mentions major thinkers like Spivak, Mohanty, and Abu-Lughod, these citations are largely confined to a few summary references and do not substantively shape the book’s analytical framework. The book’s analysis could have been enhanced by decolonial feminist frameworks that might illuminate how IS’s gendered governance intersected with broader colonial and imperial (gendered) structures. Thinkers like those above have developed frameworks for analysing how colonial power structures, Orientalist discourses, and imperial feminisms shape both the production of knowledge about Middle Eastern women and their lived experiences. Unforgotten Women remains grounded primarily in Euro-American feminist security studies and theories and does not draw on the rich body of decolonial, postcolonial, or Global South feminist work that might have expanded its conceptual reach—something that seems particularly important in a work focused on “local Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish women.” Without engaging with non-Western scholars and theories whilst applying a Western-developed, Western-centric framework onto a Middle Eastern context, questions of applicability arise.
The second limitation is slightly more structural in nature. By dividing up the analytical chapters between “Sunni Muslim” and “Yazidi” sections and using relevant women’s narratives in each and, often, comparative or implicatory phrases (i.e., “Like Sunni Muslim civilians, Yazidi women exerted restricted agency…” [p. 212]), a false equivalency is suggested. Sunni Muslim women faced authoritarian control, taxation, and violent enforcement of IS’s interpretation of Islamic law, but they retained basic “human” status within IS’s ideological framework. Ezidis faced systematic extermination, sexual slavery, forced conversion, and cultural destruction—experiences that transcend typical analyses of authoritarian citizenship. Ezidis were not human but rather property (sābayā, lit. female prisoners of war) in a system that literally commodified their bodies and lives. Whereas the book does a brilliant job of displaying the nuance of the “woman in IS” within the discussion of Sunni Muslim Arab women, there is less elucidation in respect to how Ezidi women fall comparatively within the same category rather than much more significantly toward the “victim” side, treated, as they were and still are, as literal vessels “through which IS could populate and expand its ‘caliphate’” (p. 214), not as human but as chattel (p. 112). The conceptual risk to treat Ezidi women as similarly governed is to understate the specificity of their dehumanization within IS ideology and practice. The book cites Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge (Intersectionality, 2016) to describe unaffiliated Sunni Muslim versus affiliated IS women (in terms of IS treatment) as two teams on an uneven playing field wherein one team is barred from playing (pp. 172–173). To include Ezidis in the analogy, one would have to say that they are barred from even forming a team—that is, they do not even exist within the same framework.
Finally, attention should be brought to the book’s often-used phrase “local Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish women,” used to describe the 63 women interviewed. Yes, Sunni Muslim women were often local to the caliphate. Ezidis, however, were notoriously kidnapped and forcibly relocated hundreds and even thousands of kilometres away from their homeland in Shingal/Sinjar; they were markedly not local. Terming them “local” cannot help but again harken to a colonial view on the people and the region. Relatedly, while the book’s author has been more sensitive in terms of categorisation in the past (see Gina Vale, “Liberated, not free: Yazidi women after Islamic State captivity,” Small Wars & Insurgencies, 31(3), 2020), the classifying of Ezidis as “Kurdish” is similarly colonially obscuring. The spelling of “Yazidi” is also problematic but for slightly different reasons. The initial “Y” noise (IPA: [j]) is not reflective of in-group pronunciation, and, more importantly, it has been used as an excuse for genocidal attacks. Due to IS’s treatment of Ezidis, as detailed in the book, applying the initial-Y label to Ezidis, especially survivors, can be re-traumatising (R. Latham Lechowick, ‘I won’t let them be like me’: Ezidi Women’s Agency and Identity after the Sinjar Genocide, 2024, 51–53).
Despite its theoretical challenges and occasional analytical flattening, The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State remains a significant and timely contribution. Vale succeeds in carving out space between the exhausted binaries of victim/perpetrator to illuminate a third, underexamined figure found within conflict: woman as governed civilian. The book’s achievements begin with the methodological centring of unaffiliated local women’s testimonies, paired with the rigorous intersectional reading of IS’s bureaucratic and ideological machinery. Subsequent engagement with feminist security studies and rebel governance literature provides an urgently needed model for analysing extremist proto-states through a gendered lens. The work’s sophisticated deconstruction of the monolithic “woman in IS” category, reveals a complex, stratified system of governance where intersectional hierarchies determine women’s access to rights, resources, and protection. This is particularly evident in the author’s nuanced analysis of Sunni Muslim women’s experiences. Vale’s work represents a crucial contribution to understanding how intersectional hierarchies function within extremist governance systems, demonstrating that intersectionality is not merely useful but can be essential for analysing gendered dimensions of rebel control.
