Reasons Behind Reasons: A Communitarian Reading of Women’s Radicalization and Family Bombings in Southeast Asia

This paper analyses conceptual frameworks that have been suggested in the literature for understanding women’s radicalization, including the emergent phenomenon of family bombings, focusing on Indonesia and Malaysia. We argue that understanding these trends requires grappling with socio-culturally specific gender-related concepts and that the liberal political theory framework that has informed a significant body of research in this area, with its emphasis on individuality, has limited utility for making sense of the new models of women’s engagement in extremism in Southeast Asia’. We suggest that a communitarian philosophical framework has the potential to provide new context-specific insights on radicalization, extremism and terrorism in Southeast Asia. We apply this approach to a reading of the family suicide bombings in Surabaya and Sidoarjo, East Java, Indonesia, in May 2018.