Mia Mellissa Bloom is an Associate professor in International and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University and a fellow at the International Center for the Study of Terrorism. She is the author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror, Living Together After Ethnic Killing with Roy Licklider, and Bombshell: Women and Terrorism. Bloom is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has held research or teaching appointments at Princeton, Cornell, Harvard, and McGill Universities. She has a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, a Masters in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a Bachelors from McGill University in Russian and Middle East Studies and speaks nine languages.
The first section takes into an actual suicide bomb attack by a woman in Moscow in March of 2010. I intended to provide the reader with what it feels like to be on the scene, including the sights and sounds. But the whole book provides details never before published about the women who engage in terrorism, why they did it, and how being involved in terrorism changed their lives.Although people might assume that women’s participation in terrorism or in any form of political violence might help level the society in terms of the equality between men and women, the reality is not the case.Only in cases in which women are not just cannon fodder as bombers but also participate as leaders and ideologues that women’s involvement helps the status of women in the society as a whole.In places like Europe, women’s participation in terrorism has led to a variety of women leaders. A good example is Ulrike Meinhof who led the Red Army Faction in Germany or members of the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland. Many of the women in Ireland now hold seats in Stormont, the Northern Irish Parliament.However, if the best and the brightest women of the society become suicide bombers, this will actually eliminate the next generation of female leaders.In essence, my book conveys the message that women who want to do something for their people or their society need to find other ways to do so. Women need to know that they can make more of a difference with their lives than with their deaths. That is one of the underlying messages in my work and I hope that in writing a book about women’s involvement, to shed some light on the phenomenon.The final point that I make in the book is with regard to what we can expect next. I think that as more and more targets are hardened and made difficult for terrorists to access, they will switch tactics and use children. We have already seen the emergence of Islamic Schools in Pakistan training very young children to become suicide bombers before the age of 14. We will see more children enter the fray and sadly, this will have devastating consequences on their societies but also on forces that have to face children.
Mia Bloom Bombshell: Women and Terrorism University of Pennsylvania Press320 pages, 6 x 9 inches ISBN 978 0812243901
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