Returning Home: An Intersectional Gender Analysis of the Repatriation, Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Foreign Fighters

The terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) recruited an unprecedented number of women (so-called foreign fighters) to join their territory from approximately 2013 until 2018. Since ISIS’s territorial defeat in 2019, thousands of women and children have been detained in camps in northern Syria or prisons in Iraq awaiting repatriation by their respective governments. This thesis examines state responses to repatriation, rehabilitation and reintegration of foreign fighters from an intersectional gender perspective. The findings of the thesis demonstrate that gendered and racialised narratives of victimhood and villains shape states' repatriation policies as well as the rehabilitation and reintegration programmes designed for foreign fighters.