Description
In Kenya, policies and programmes aimed at countering violent extremism define this phenomenon using a top down, Western-based, and colonial perspective, focusing on Muslims’ violence and Islamist groups (Aroussi 2020; Oando and Achieng 2021). This paper explores the understanding of violent extremism (VE) among Muslim women in the Coast of Kenya, a community that is located at important junctures, subject to recruitment by armed groups such as Al-Shabab and experiencing violence as the state attempts to counter VE. The article uses body mapping as a method to study VE from an embodied, bottom-up perspective. Centring Muslim women’s voices as co-producers of knowledge on VE is important for its decolonising and empowering potential and due to their positioning by patriarchal state institutions and the international community as both ‘the suspect’ and ‘the solution’ to political violence (Ahmed Ali and Kizi Nzovu 2023).
Our participants used VE to refer not only to violence by Al-Shabaab but also gender based violence, gang violence, and State violence. These findings pose an important tension for critical scholarship on the concept of VE. Using two selected body maps, we interrogate the use VE as a framework for analysing harms in women's lives. We argue that as a community bearing the brunt of countering violent extremism initiatives (CVE), our participants deployed the language of VE as an act of resistance, both to the violent policing produced by CVE policies, and by the patriarchal violence visited upon them by men in their lives.
By sharing our method, this article contributes to emerging literature about the potential of using arts as a decolonial approach to research. The article also contributes to feminist literature and existing debates in the field on the linkages between gender based violence, gang violence, state violence and violent extremism in the Kenyan context and beyond.
