Affective Disengagement and Gendered Agency: Women’s Pathways out of Jihadist Radicalization in Morocco

Abstract

This article examines women’s pathways out of jihadist radicalization in Morocco through the concept of affective disengagement, defined as the gradual erosion of the emotional and moral energies that sustain militant commitment. Drawing on eight life-story interviews with six Moroccan women involved in jihadist networks, the study adopts an interpretative phenomenological approach to trace how commitment weakens over time. The findings demonstrate that disengagement does not typically begin with doctrinal repudiation. Rather, it unfolds through a slow recalibration of affective orientations—trust, fervor, moral urgency—that once rendered participation meaningful. Ethical contradictions between ideals of justice and lived experiences of violence, surveillance, gendered subordination, and deprivation generate fear, shame, guilt, and exhaustion. These affective processes progressively deplete attachment before explicit ideological doubt emerges. At the same time, disengagement is not merely subtractive. Women re-anchor their moral worlds around care, relational obligation, and survival within systems of male guardianship and social surveillance, producing forms of partial disengagement rather than total rupture. By integrating insights from affect theory, moral injury scholarship, and feminist analyses of agency, the article reframes disengagement as a relational and gendered sociomoral transformation. It challenges ideology-first models of exit and suggests that durable disengagement depends not only on cognitive change but on the reconstruction of affective attachment and morally livable futures within constrained social environments.