| Summary: | Studies into terrorism have traditionally focused on men, yet females play an important role in the organisation and undertaking of violence. To understand -this role, this thesis investigates the motivation and mobilisation of female terrorists. A meta-analysis of research into female terrorism highlighted small sample sizes, a reliance on media reports, and little empirical analysis. A review of potential data sources was conducted and revealed that open source material held much potential. Subsequently, a Terrorist Biography Dataset of the life histories of 222 female and 269 male terrorists was created. To test stereotypes surrounding whom female terrorists are, empirical analysis was conducted on the socio-demographic characteristics of the Terrorist Biography Dataset, and the utility of a female terrorist profile was dismissed. To understand the personal drives underlying female mobilisation, biographical accounts were coded for motivation, recruitment and role. A log-linear analysis found a significant interaction between male and female motivation, however the results revealed that these differences were partially dependent 011 terrorist role. A 'pathway' analysis was undertaken to provide a dynamic explanation of female mobilisation. Commonalities and differences were found between males and females, although for both genders, mobilisation was found to be social in nature. A more stratified pathway analysis sowed different routes to violence dependent upon terrorist motivation and role. Finally, POSAC and regression analyses identified the possibility of using knowledge of key events within terrorist
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