Gender orders and methodological nationalism

Feminist IR scholarship on armed conflict has increasingly drawn on critical studies of men and masculinities (CSMM) as a way to understand the importance of gender in creating organized violence (Hooper Reference Hooper2001; Baaz and Stern Reference Baaz and Stern2009; Duncanson Reference Duncanson2009; Higate Reference Higate2012b; Maria Eriksson Baaz Reference Maria Eriksson Baaz2012; Kirby Reference Kirby2013; Duriesmith Reference Duriesmith2014; Parpart Reference Parpart2015). This scholarship has argued that masculinities make war possible, by producing powerful patterns of gender performance which reward certain kinds of violence and punish others (Goldstein Reference Goldstein2001; Duriesmith Reference Duriesmith2017). In addition to making war possible, masculinities intimately shape the form that war takes, conveying certain kinds of violence as suspectly effeminate or dangerously barbaric, whereas valorizing other tactics as heroic. These alignments between organized, state-based violence have come to be termed ‘militarized masculinity’ by feminist scholarship due to the alignment between being a man and involvement in the military or other armed groups.

While this literature began with a primary focus on militarized masculinities in the Global North, over the past decade, it has expanded significantly to interrogate the more diverse ways in which notions of manhood and organized violence intersect across the globe (Henry and Kirby Reference Henry and Kirby2012). Though there is some theoretical diversity in this literature; the most dominant approach has been shaped by R.W. Connell’s notions of masculinities and the gender order (Hooper Reference Hooper2001; Sjoberg Reference Sjoberg2013; Carver Reference Carver2014; Duriesmith Reference Duriesmith2017). Connell’s approach, which emphasizes the multiplicity of masculinities and femininities in society, and their hierarchical configuration into a relatively sedimented ordering of gender, has formed the basis of most current investigations into masculinities from feminist IR thinkers.

It is easy to think about masculinity and femininity as idealized tropes about what men and women should be. While this usage certainly has some salience, it is not a sufficient way to understand the multiplicity of forms which gender takes in different locations and at different times. For this reason, CSMM scholarship has tended to understand masculinities as ‘simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practice through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality, and culture’ (Connell Reference Connell2005a, 71). Accordingly, there are multiple masculinities and femininities that exist at any given time, they are primarily differentiated as structural positions within a hierarchical ordering of gender, and they are best understood not as idealized or exaggerated forms of that gender, but as a relational positioning between groups. This understanding of masculinities has tended to focus on the nation-state as the site where these multiple places within gender relations are located.

The notion of the gender order allowed for conceptions of multiple masculinities and femininities to be integrated with a theorization of hierarchy which went further than sex/class articulations of patriarchy (Connell Reference Connell1990). This approach encourages a focus on the interplay between the various articulations of gender in any given space, and direct attention to how a diversity of gendered constructions create and reinforce patriarchy. While Connell’s original understanding emphasized the relational quality of gender, these positions were primarily framed as points within a nationally bounded society. In her later work Connell has gone beyond the nation-state to address global forces, and in particular how globalized neoliberal business masculinities create a global gender order, her original framing of the nation-state continues to dominate CSMM work within feminist IR (Connell Reference Connell2005c). When talking about formal power, Connell emphasized the state as the formalization of the gender order and key for mobilizing labour in the maintenance of gendered oppression (Connell Reference Connell1987, 125–134). While the concept of the gender order has also been challenged by post-structuralist feminist authors, who have seen it as too structural and too fixed (Hooper Reference Hooper2001, 56–57), the framework continues to form a central component of work on militarism, masculinity, and change.

While we feel that Connell’s theorizing on masculinities still has a lot to offer for studying the gendered structure of armed conflicts, the fact that it has led to a reading which locates the gender order within the boundaries of the nation-state needs some revisions.Footnote ² The majority of studies on militarized masculinity within feminist IR have focussed on state militaries in the Global North, with a particular wealth of scholarship on the armed forces of the US, the UK, and Canada (Whitworth Reference Whitworth2004; Duncanson Reference Duncanson2013; Mackenzie Reference Mackenzie2015; Welland Reference Welland2015). Scholarship has been most attentive to questions of change or contestation in militarized masculinities (Barrett Reference Barrett1996; Higate Reference Higate2012a; Duncanson Reference Duncanson2013; Duriesmith Reference Duriesmith2018), and to how masculinity constructs war (Tickner Reference Tickner1992; Goldstein Reference Goldstein2001; Hutchings Reference Hutchings2008; Sjoberg Reference Sjoberg2013).

Situating state militaries within the national gender order has proven extremely valuable in understanding conventional inter-state wars. CSMM scholars have been able to show how states draw on notions of manhood to mobilize men from marginalized class and racial groups to fight (Knouff Reference Knouff2010). The state has been theorized as the mechanism through which two competing gender orders clash, and numerous critical military studies scholars have explored the ways in which the military is integral to the maintenance of western gender orders, mobilizing complicit masculinities in the maintenance of hegemonic arrangements (Zalewski and Parpart Reference Zalewski and Parpart1997; Hutchings Reference Hutchings2008; Parpart and Zalewski Reference Parpart and Zalewski2008; Belkin Reference Belkin2012; Sjoberg Reference Sjoberg2013).

Significant recent studies, such as Duncanson’s (Reference Duncanson2015) research on ‘softer’, masculinities, have continued this line of theorizing by exploring potential shifts in militarized masculinities as a mechanism through which hegemonic masculinity in the gender order might change. Duncanson’s work, like much of the work focussing on state militaries, consciously adopts a methodological nationalist perspective, focussing on the important nexus between state and military masculinities to construct a more-or-less stable gender order. When a researcher like Duncanson (Reference Duncanson2015, 232), states that ‘constructions of masculinity and femininity in the military context arguably shape the entire gender order’, the ‘entire gender order’ they are referring to is understandably framed in reference to the confines of methodological nationalism. Focussing on nationally constituted gender orders has been a productive avenue of investigation for studies of militarized masculinities, however, with the increased desire to study militarization outside of the state apparatus this approach has its limits.

In many of the conflicts which now occupy international attention, the boundary of the state works far less clearly in defining the gender order than in the case of formal militaries (Duriesmith Reference Duriesmith2017). Particularly for post-colonial sites where the histories of nation and nationalism are so tightly bound to the experiences of colonization and the anti-colonial struggle, comfortably defaulting to the nation as the natural site of the gender order becomes untenable. Locating gender order within the nation risks inscribing the false unity and sense of national continuity through time which post-colonial scholars have warned against (Duara Reference Duara1995). Nationalist thinking can lead to IR scholarship ascribing historical linkages across the (post-)colonial world within national narratives, as demonstrated by Robbie Shilliam’s The Black Pacific (2015), who shows that the pre-occupation with Western states has been common even with scholarship on post-colonialism. This kind of mischaracterization reifies the nation as the only important story to tell about these sites and experiences. As many feminist scholars are interested in charting the functioning of gender hierarchies in sites of violence which do not fit neatly in national boundaries, developing analytic methods that resist methodological nationalism is particularly important for feminist analysis and takes a decolonial approach to masculinities.

Feminist studies exploring the reconstruction of gender hierarchies after war have focussed directly and intensely on colonial relations. Prominent examples such as in Mackenzie’s (Reference Mackenzie2012) work on the conjugal order in Sierra Leone, Mackenzie and Fosters’ (Reference Mackenzie and Foster2017) work on yearning for gender order after war in Palestine, Meger’s (Reference Meger2016) research on gender hierarchy and sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Myrttinen’s (Reference Myrttinen2012) research on post-conflict masculinities in Timor Leste, all default to framing the gender order/hierarchy in the nation. In accounting for the multiplicity of power relations at play, these scholars have presented hybridized accounts, charting the integration of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial ordering principles into the new orderings of masculinities and femininities.

Accounts of hybridization tend to explore the encounter between multiple national gender orders as an explanation for how militarized violence now functions. For example, Myrttinen’s (Reference Myrttinen2012, 110) work on Timor Leste suggests that ‘the traditional gender order, whatever its precise form, did not exist separately from Portuguese colonial power, the Catholic Church or, after the 1975 invasion, the Indonesian state and its military forces.’ This kind of account is valuable in explaining the adaptation of the pre-colonial forms of gender ordering into contemporary gendered power structures in Timor Leste. Despite this, we believe it must also come back to Burton’s (Reference Burton2009, 13) questioning on the allure of nation in understanding post-colonial violence: ‘How do we resist the seduction of national narratives and make sense of the violences they enact under the guise of patriotism, imperial and otherwise?’

IR scholarship, and particularly feminist IR scholarship, cannot be said to be focussed on the nation-state alone, or that it fails to critically investigate the creation of societies along national lines. Despite this, the other approaches to studying conflict and post-conflict masculinities in the Global South risk reproducing methodological nationalist assumptions if they do not engage with questions of scale as a conscious component of their methodology. The competing framings of the international, the global, and the transnational all implicitly buy into methodological nationalism by viewing things that cross borders as inter or transnational, or in the dichotomous relationship between global/local. Some work has tried to explain cross-cutting connections by suggesting terminologies such as ‘glocal’ to discuss hybrid forms between the local and global, but this too remains tied to drawing connections between two pre-figured categories (Beck and Sznaider Reference Beck and Sznaider2010).

Each of these articulations of gender hierarchy rely on a sense of scale, as the gender order necessarily contains a notion of the scale of which it occupies. It is for this reason that scholars tend to emphasize the inherent instability of what the hegemonic or most privileged form of masculinity is, sometimes referring to hegemonic masculinity as the most privileged in a military organization (Barrett Reference Barrett1996), or the most privileged in a state (Pullen and Rhodes Reference Pullen and Rhodes2008), or within the international order (Connell Reference Connell2005b). The limitation within each of these frames is that the gender order and the form of masculinity that is hegemonic operate in cross-cutting scalar forms simultaneously. What is hegemonic, for examples, within a biker sub-culture in Australia may be thoroughly marginalized in the national gender order, and what is hegemonic across Australia may be marginalized as parochial in certain global sites of commerce. Studies which focus on the national scale, and of the role of organizations within the nation certainly matter and remain hugely productive. But there is much to be gained from feminist IR work which can chart the multiple overlapping scales that create nested positioning within multiple often contradictory hierarchies.

Hameiri and Jones’s (Reference Hameiri and Jones2017, 56) explanation here is helpful in understanding why a conscious consideration of scale is necessary: ‘scales like “local”, “subnational”, “national” or “global” are not neutral; they involve particular configurations of actors, resources and political opportunity structures that always favour some forces and agendas over others.’ The argument we are making for active consideration of scale in the study of militarized masculinity mirrors earlier moves within human geography which have been premised on showing that ‘scale is not necessarily a preordained hierarchical framework for ordering the world’ (Marston, Reference Marston2000, 220). The hierarchical privileging of national or global scales entails a ‘God’s Eye view’ which naturalizes transcending hierarchical theoretical models of human society (Marston et al. Reference Marston, Jones and Woodward2005, 422). In contrast to this single-scale approach, human geographers argue that a ‘flat ontology’ which does not presume the natural or most important scale is required (Marston et al. Reference Marston, Woodward and Jones2007). In advocating for the politics of scale we do not suggest that drawing on scale can be avoided, but that it should be actively considered, choices about scale made explicitly, and the implications of these choices weighed as part of a feminist analysis.

The politics of scale can address the multiplicity of hierarchies present in militants’ lives more productively, by actively considering the way in which politics goes into the configuration of different axes of power. Adopting a conscious rejection of methodological nationalism when the project is not primarily about studying the nation opens up new possibilities by avoiding identifying problems as national problems rather than consciously asking more difficult questions about scale.

The actions of men we interviewed cannot be simply understood as acts of revolt against a nation, though they may oppose the Indonesian government, their frame is not national. Similarly, their involvement in community conflicts such as Ambon and the Philippines is not solely explained by local dynamics. Though they were involved in a global movement, this also does not fully encapsulate their practices of violence. The boundaries between their actions as charity workers, robbers, financiers, people smugglers, terrorists, civil warriors, foreign fighters, and global jihadis reflected individuals navigating multiple orderings of gender in different contexts. It is for this reason that we suggest that a methodological nationalist perspective risks damaging our understanding of how militarized masculinities shape contemporary conflict. As we show through the life history of Ali, applying a multi-scale analysis shows the inadequacy of methodological nationalism for understanding militarized masculinity and provides new conceptual tools for charting gendered power in the lives of violent actors.

Research method

This paper is based on life history research conducted during 2016 in Java (Jakarta, Solo, Yogyakarta, and Semarang) with former foreign fighters affiliated with jihadi networks. In this paper, we employ the term jihadi to refer to the broad cluster of people involved in militant politico-religious networks. The participants were ex-members from a range of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI)-linked activist organizations whose activities ranged from running schools and providing charity to the poor, to fighting overseas, and perpetrating attacks within Indonesia. The men we focussed on had been foreign fighters, primarily in the Soviet/Afghan conflict during the 1980s, and also within the Philippines.

The participants were also involved in some conflicts internal to Indonesia, such as Ambon, Poso, and Aceh, but participated in a pattern that we also understand to fit within the ‘foreign fighter’ dynamic as they often travelled significant distances to participate in wars, primarily undertaken by differing cultural and ethnic groups. Within these contexts they were also interpreted by the locals in these sites as foreign outsiders, even when the locals were also Indonesian nationals. The understanding of foreign fighters that we adopt is somewhat more expansive than the norm in the field, such as Malet’s (Reference Malet2013, 9) definition as: ‘noncitizens of conflict states who join insurgencies during civil conflicts.’ As the core intent of this paper is to challenge methodological nationalism, the definition of who is a ‘foreign’ fighter is necessarily fraught. Despite this, we feel that the perceived foreignness of these wars for the participants, and by their account of how locals perceived them, means that they should rightly be considered foreign fighters in that context. For that reason, we are including those who travel within a nation-state to participate in an ‘others’ war within our understanding of a foreign fighter.

Although we focus on one life history in this paper (that of Ali), nine life histories were conducted, along with a battery of other supporting interviews with former fighters, network supporters, and family members. We gained access to these men through a connection with Yayasan Prasasti Perdamaian, an organization that works with former jihadis and their families to promote integration into society. Our participants’ life histories were recorded in unstructured interviews undertaking over multiple sittings. Surrounding the formal interviews, there were long periods of ‘hanging out’, sometimes outside the mosque with groups of men drinking sweetened tea and smoking clove cigarettes, or in more intimate settings longer periods of chatting while grazing on food and coffee. The period of fieldwork also included extended periods with some participants as we drove through Solo, Yogyakarta, and Semarang. These men were interviewed to understand how gender shaped their involvement in foreign fighter networks and how their participation shifted their experiences of masculinity.

The life histories method varies from other forms of qualitative interview techniques in that it is intended to record a biographical account and chart change through time. The interviews began by asking the participants to tell us about their life from childhood until today, with questions interjected to clarify the timeline of their life. After having established a timeline of the participants’ lives, follow-up questions were used to explore key points where the trajectory changed and how aspects of gender manifested in key events. Subsequent interviews were used to explore particular themes (such as ethnicity), events (such as arrival in Afghanistan), or contradictions (such as the notion of equality in a hierarchical network). This technique was intended to be reflexive, allowing participants to guide the conversations alongside the researchers to continually interrogate the issues we felt were important (Ackerly et al. Reference Ackerly, Stern and True2006, 4).

Taking this approach was tremendously productive, as participants directed us to conversations and questions which we had not considered, such as the performance of nasheed chants to cementing bonds with new members. This approach enabled us to explore complex processes and changes in our participants’ lives while remaining attentive to questions of structure, discourse, and power (Connell 2010, 54–71). The life history method has a prominent place in CSMM and has been used by some influential works in this field (Messner Reference Messner1992; Messerschmidt Reference Messerschmidt2000; Connell Reference Connell2005a). The method has also previously been used to great effect by Azca (Reference Azca2011), to study fighters’ pathways into Indonesian jihadi groups and in Julie Chernov Hwang’s book Why Terrorists Quit. However, both Azca and Hwang’s research do not include a gender perspective and is more interested in the transformation of religious ideology or group membership.

To analyse the interview transcripts, a timeline was first written which recorded the key events in their lives alongside other important developments in that period, such as the fall of Suharto, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or the 9/11 attacks. This timeline was used as the basis for charting change and conducting a thematic analysis of the interview transcripts. Like recent innovations in auto-ethnography within IR, we see the life history method as an underexplored approach to producing knowledge about subjective experience, complex processes, and change throughout an individuals’ life (Neumann Reference Neumann2010; Fitzgerald Reference Fitzgerald2015). The life history approach aligns with the use of auto-ethnography to counter a tendency in IR scholarship to ‘write the self out of social science’ (Brigg and Bleiker Reference Brigg and Bleiker2010, 782).

Focussing on a single life history also resonates with recent moves towards the use of biography in IR. Those working on diaries have argued that it is not necessary for a source to tell ‘the whole truth, objective truth, or impartial truth’ to have value (Rudolph and Rudolph Reference Rudolph and Rudolph2003, 681). The subjective knowledge contained within individual biographies provides important information for understanding identity formation and the construction of politically salient categories like class, race, or gender (Rudolph and Rudolph Reference Rudolph and Rudolph2003). This is particularly imperative when writing about what has come to be known as violent extremism, as much of the IR scholarship on this topic has not directly engaged with those individuals’ who are involved in it. The lack of direct scholarship working with violent extremists to explore masculinities means that scholarship has lent itself to broadly generalized accounts of how terrorist ideology is masculine, without granular explorations of how multiple masculinities shape its practice (Morgan Reference Morgan2014; Necef Reference Necef2016; Van Leuven et al. Reference Van Leuven, Mazurana and Gordon2016). Focussing on one life history is not done to suggest that Ali’s experiences are generalizable, but to show how the universalized narratives of militarized masculinity failed to capture the complexity of his experiences, and that this complexity matters for understanding the phenomena. While we draw on other participants insights, this intimate focus helps to counter the uncomplicated national comparisons which can come from smoothing out the narratives of multiple individuals to craft a coherent story among a cohort.

Ali’s life history

We interviewed Ali in a downtown Jakarta mosque.Footnote ³ Ali is a short, softly spoken, and well-mannered man in the later stages of his life who has been involved in jihadi networks for almost 40 years. About a year before our interview, Ali and some of his fellow veterans of the Soviet–Afghan war had violently taken control of the mosque from a Daesh-supporting faction and had since set it up as a de facto home base of operation for former Afghan fighters in the Indonesian capital.Footnote ⁴ Although Ali is still a respected member of the community of former fighters, due to a bout in prison he is no longer an active member in the militant activities that defined his most of his adult life.

Ali began his life as a working-class Betawi boy in peri-urban Java outside of central Jakarta.Footnote ⁵ While Ali is currently an experienced jihadi, having fought in Afghanistan and Ambon, he began his life in an unremarkable family. As the son of a religiously moderate and politically inactive tailor, his pathway into the Islamic networks was not made possible by existing familial connections. Instead, after a relatively stable, secular upbringing in the state school system, Ali describes his life as disaffected and a sense of exclusion from the nation-building process going on around him by the Jakarta elite. His childhood experiences during the 1960s and 1970s were marked by the overthrown of Sukarno by Suharto, and the brutal anti-communist purges. While the crackdown on Darul Islam had largely finished by the time he was born, the continuing tensions between the multi-religious ideology of Pancasila and the enduring influence of Islamic activists shaped the social milieu in which he was raised.

He explains that the transformative moment for him was reading newspaper articles on the international oppression of Muslims when he was 17, something that he felt he had to act on as a man. He describes the realization that other Muslims were suffering placed a demand on him that ‘cannot be done by mouth alone’. Although this catalytic moment was a key juncture where Ali’s life-course shifted, his existing perception that local Islamic activists were oppressed and his sense of exclusion from the Jakarta elite primed him to react. After ‘uncovering’ the international oppression of Muslims, Ali began reading Islamic texts and studying at a local mosque which encouraged a stricter approach to Islam. The new mosque welcomed his enthusiasm, and older men there invited him to join in a study group that focussed on action, rather than just on the recitation of texts.

After a year of involvement in his study group a senior man invited Ali to become more involved in an Islamic activist network by helping to provide aid to the poor or engaging in da’wah (proselytising) activities to convert new followers. Soon he was being asked to go beyond da’wah and collecting alms and began stockpiling weapons. His involvement in this stage was not directly violent but included training recruits in weapon use and martial arts. By his early 20s, Ali was called on by the network to help older men who were on the run from authorities to move around the country and evade the government. Giving sanctuary to marked men was a risky role as it brought him into contact with many senior members who had been involved in the Darul Islam (DI) rebellion who were known to authorities.Footnote ⁶ This eventually brought him to the attention of the police, and he received an offer from a senior leader with the DI network to travel to Afghanistan as a foreign fighter as a way to avoid arrest. The offer to travel to Afghanistan was a considerable honour provided as a reward for his commitment and courage.

Ali talks about this time in his life as the period where he ‘really found what I wanted’. The network, Ali explains, was a brotherhood where he could work towards something great and have a feeling of belonging in the global brotherhood. The network supported this travel, and he described Afghanistan as a kind of paradise, exactly as he had hoped. He had arrived in a country where people practised proper Islam. He explained: ‘I start to accept Islam as one body, and with the weakness of some other Muslims I need to fill up that gap. Because the brotherhood among Muslims is far stronger than blood.’ This conclusion has a direct grounding in the religious doctrine of ummat al-Islamiyah (the global Islamic community or ummah) and provided a sense of belonging to the men we interviewed.

Although Ali’s description of this period is ecstatic, his position within the organization at the time was far from privileged. As a Southeast Asian man with a very modest Islamic education, he was placed in a supporting role. As with the majority of Indonesian men who went over to Afghanistan, he was kept away from most of the fighting while he received training on Arabic, weapons use, and Islamic teaching. He and his peers were not seen as reliable enough to participate in the direct conflict, since their knowledge of Arabic was poor, and they were seen as practising a version of Islam corrupted by paganism. This positioning appears to have been particularly challenging for the Betawi recruits who had been the spearhead of violent action within the Indonesian capital and often expressed their role as being the kinetic partners of their more scholarly Javanese peers. The collective relegation of Indonesians to supporting roles resulted in material disadvantages in Afghanistan where Southeast Asian men were treated in a paternalistic way and their lives being heavily regulated by other mujahideen. Despite this subordinate position, Ali describes this period as the stage at which he discovered his new identity, as mujahid, an identity as a fighter which remains today where he is primarily known as an ‘Afghan alumni’ in the network. He explained this change primarily as a process of becoming disciplined. This transformative process from the unruly civilian masculinity to a hardened and disciplined military form is common to the men we interviewed which also resonates closely with the work on masculinities in Western militaries.

After training in Afghanistan and seeing little combat, Ali returns home as a hero. While as far as we have been able to discover his actual involvement in fighting was minimal, and in supporting role, on his return, he was known as a warrior and a senior in the network. When he returned home it was with the intention of changing the Indonesian government to fit the paradise he had experienced in Afghanistan. He explains, ‘God already gave us independence, but we chose to take secular rules, rather than God’s rules. Of course, when I came back to Indonesia I had the desire to change that.’

From the early 1990s until 1999, Ali continued to support the network despite maintaining a more or less regular life of work and family. After the outbreak of violence between Christian and Muslim communities in Ambon (a region where populations are roughly equal) on Eid al-Adha in 1999, Ali travels with a breakaway faction of JI to fight against the Christians that they perceive as threatening the Muslim community.Footnote ⁷ To make this move, Ali and his fellow Afghan veterans had taken over a charity organization (KOMPAK: the action committee for crisis response) to operate in Ambon with less scrutiny. They collect alms and use this to support their actions in the conflict-affected region (Karnavian Reference Karnavian2015, 96–97). Their involvement in Ambon was disastrous for the conflict, escalating violence and equipping local Islamic groups with small arms to use against civilian populations (Ramakrishna Reference Ramakrishna2015, 192; Hwang Reference Hwang2018). During this time Ali is heavily involved in direct fighting and becomes a significant player in the organization of the network.

After 3 years of fighting, Ali returned to Jakarta where he was quickly arrested. Ali was charged with conspiracy to assassinate members of the police force as part of a jailbreaking attempt. While he does not deny that he was collecting weapons for the network, he claims that he was not planning an attack. Ali was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail. The experience of imprisonment shook some of his previous convictions and resulted in rethinking some of his ideas around fighting. In particular, he began to believe in the importance of older fighters maintaining the discipline: ‘You must keep the spirit of jihad, but you must keep the rules of the game.’ The commentary around the loss of rules and discipline is one directed both towards the string of terrorist attacks in Indonesia committed by JI in the 2000s and to the current tactics of Daesh, which he says tarnish the reputation of Islam due to their cruelty. While Ali suggests that groups like Daesh having ruined the reputation of ‘Islam’ in general, there is reason to believe that this has a lot to do with the loss of respect and status held by former fighters in the general community.

Since being imprisoned, his role in the network has changed; now in his 50s, he serves as a kind of senior statesman despite financially struggling. Despite the respect that he is afforded, he insists that all are equal in the network; he tells us ‘we are all brothers’ over and over again, while in the next sentence explaining the seniority of his position or the inferiority of those men too weak of spirit to fight. He is still involved in supporting violence but does not actively participate in violent attacks; he is a marked man subject to police surveillance. His greatest goal now is for his three boys to fight and hopefully die in a conflict protecting the ummah. This would not only validate his sons as real heroes but would also justify his current inaction. He narrates one occasion to us: ‘I said to my son who is 17, he came to me, and I said to him you can choose any group you want to. But you have to fight till you die.’

At each stage, his role in the network is defined by his gender. Women are conspicuously absent from much of the former fighter’s discussion about their activities and experiences. Most of the spaces that fighters occupy are homosocial with strict limitations on interactions with women. But based on what we know from other contexts and from the few women that we had the opportunity to talk to, their exclusion seems to have more to do with former foreign fighters understanding of the network as a brotherhood than it does to do with women’s real lack of significance (Parashar Reference Parashar2011). When directly prompted, Ali has some comments about the role of women (that they should obey and not try to go beyond the talents God gives them). But beyond this, he defines his role as a man first and foremost against the position of other men.

Scale and militarized masculinities

The trajectory that brought Ali to the little Mosque in Jakarta for our interviews is common in many ways to the other men we interviewed in Indonesian jihadi networks. Ali performed a wide range of roles throughout his life and it would be easy to characterize him variously as a soldier, a leader, a terrorist, a humanitarian, and a religious figure in his community. In each of the roles, he is very clear that his participation was motivated by the desire to be a good man in the eyes of Allah, to protect his brothers, and for the chance to adopt the mantle of hero. His original recruitment into the network was directly motivated by the desire to live up to the demands placed on him as a man to protect his fellow Muslims from oppression. While in Afghanistan he describes the process of becoming a true fighter as one of becoming a man. Before leaving Indonesia, he was still a boy, impetuous, and undisciplined. Having seen war, he says his metamorphosis was immediate: ‘We automatically have discipline.’ This status as a veteran of Afghanistan equipped him with authority to lead men when violence breaks out in Ambon. While he explains that now he is too old to be active in the kinetic part of jihad, he still has a role as a disciplined man by teaching younger men the rules, something he says is desperately needed by many young men who are too quick to act.

If we were to take a methodological nationalist approach to Ali’s life, it would be easy to automatically frame his experiences along with a national narrative. His actions can correctly be described as part of a struggle over the dominant form of masculinity within the national Indonesian gender order. Here we could talk about of the rise of Indonesian Islamism over the second half of the twentieth century, and the continuation of the DI’s attempt to create an Islamic state within Indonesian during the 1950s (Temby Reference Temby2010). We could also emphasize that Ali’s life is characterized by a particular period of economic transformation during the 1990s. During this period Westernized business masculinities were trust into new positions of power at the same time as traditional gender configurations of the strong military man, the traditional leader, and the ethnic nationalist all began to lose dominance (Nilan Reference Nilan2009). One might explore his actions after returning to Afghanistan with reference to the presidency of Suharto, positioned as a secularized Javanese king, who provides a reference point to rebel against (Sutarto Reference Sutarto2006). This frames Indonesian masculinity as torn between the nationalist ‘red and white’ faction and the Islamist ‘green’ faction. While this account has value, its salience diminishes when looking at Ali’s life through other scales.

At a local level, Ali’s ethnic background means inheriting a powerful tradition of the Betawi strong man (jago) which has often been affiliated with notions of anti-Dutch resistance in Jakarta. This notion is connected to Betawi people’s identity as the local Jakartans and a sense of marginalization by Javanese and Chinese elites. In addition to this dynamic factors such as a tradition of martial arts (Silat Betawi), of action-oriented Islamic faith, and a unique position within the archipelago compared to the Javanese jihadi’s based in Central Java, all structure Ali’s masculinity in particular ways (Wilson and Brown Reference Wilson and Brown2007; Nilan et al. Reference Nilan, Demartoto and Wibowo2014).

The tradition of the Javanese warrior, as is shown by Nilan et al. (Reference Nilan, Demartoto and Wibowo2014, 80–83), is deeply entwined in the cultural vernacular of manhood in contemporary Indonesia. Even for most men who do not choose to fight actively, the notion of the heroic warrior remains a powerful narrative in shaping everyday masculinity and plays an important part of the national history of opposition to the Dutch. The notion of being an Islamic warrior and jago resonates deeply with Betawi identity. The mythic founder of the Jakarta, Sultan Fatahillah, was known to wage ‘jihad’ against the Dutch. Here we can see the historical connection of the colonial era to the present-day narrative of jihad against the foreign ‘others’. In this case, the adoption of a jago identity by Ali positions him within a vernacular of masculinity that pre-dates Indonesia as a discrete entity. In considering the function of these sort of anti-colonial narratives and tropes in Ali’s life, it is worth remaining conscious of their function in crafting the latter aesthetics of Indonesian nationalism and the danger of externally rejecting nationalist interpretations of these tropes as artificial (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1991).

As a Betawi man, a particular set of understandings and expectations about Ali’s identity and role in the movement separate him from the Javanese members. While Javanese tropes emphasize the warrior scholar, for Betawi men the more dominant understanding is that of the man of action who is less prone to pious contemplation. There seems to be something of a division of labour within the network with Javanese men from regions such as Yogyakarta and Solo taking on leadership and guidance roles. Owing to their position as local Jakartans, the Betawi men in the network have often been placed in the most violent front-end activities in the capital, cultivating a notion of the Betawi strongman within the network which is contrasted to the pious restraint of the Javanese. This is a point of pride for Ali and his peers. Joining the resistance provided an opportunity to continue these histories by performing an archetype of the local Betawi masculine hero.

The axes of power across class and ethnic lines also created relationships of inequality and dominance in the network. Men from marginal ethnic groups and regions in Indonesia were often given unglamorous work to support the network, those with a better Islamist pedigree were reserved for leadership and taking on the most valorized military actions. Those from the historical seats of power in Central Java received more status than Javanese fighters from marginal sites such as Bantam. In all actions, the network brought together men from differing locations and ethnicities and these markers of status were a key determinant for the reward they would receive. The salience of these distinctions was highly dependent on the location of operation, in Java, the origin of a fighter, and their familial connection to DI was of key importance.

Outside Indonesia these ethnic and class differences mattered far less. In Afghanistan Ali’s gendered position also to be understood in relation to global trends in political Islam and the emergence of Salafi ideology as a driving force. These trends are reflected in the limited roles he was given in Afghanistan. In Indonesia, the rich local Islamic traditions of jago heroes and Javanese warrior scholars gave Ali and his fellow fighters status. But in Afghanistan they marked them as religiously impure and in need of paternalistic correction. As a Southeast Asian man, he and his peers were also perceived as less masculine and virile than their Afghan, Saudi, or Yemeni peers. While the tensions between jihadi men were evident through Ali’s account, there is also a sense in which his participation in Afghanistan produced him as no longer an Indonesian Muslim man.

Ali and the other foreign fighters spoke often and animatedly about their new position in the global ummah having fought and been transformed in battle. This perceived transformation was profound, as the Afghan alumni felt that now being true global citizens of the ummah they carried the responsibility to defend other co-religionists within the global Muslim ‘family’. The theme of transitional brotherhood and an active rejection of their national, ethnic, and class identifications was one of the most consistent and powerful themes both in the life histories we conducted and in the broader battery of interviews. As Afghan alumni, the fighters we spoke to were perceived to have been part of the righteous movement of true Islamic men who had defeated the Soviet Union and led to the downfall of atheistic communism.Footnote ⁸ This narrative can also subsume otherwise unique Indonesian stories when fighters linked it to the purging of communists in the 1960s and anti-Dutch resistance efforts before that.

Conclusions: gendering war beyond the nation-state

Our research with former foreign fighters has reiterated the importance of studying gender to understand the form which violence takes (and does not take). Despite this, the difficulty in expressing the multiple, overlapping, and contradictory ways in which hierarchies of gender operate indicates to us the weakness of the existing frameworks for studying gender order. The result of this experience has not been to suggest a better unit of analysis than the nation-state, but that approaching the question of scale as a deliberate step in the analysis of gender order might improve our understanding. For our work, this might mean taking a more considered approach to the scales of analysis we select, or even remaining more reflexive and unsure of what scales could exist when we start projects.Footnote ¹⁰

What this work does not suggest is that one should automatically parrot the scales articulated by research participants and partners. Our participants drew on notions of scale and mobility as an integral part of their political projects. Where it was expedient, they utilized a national frame, talking about Indonesian experiences of colonialism and oppression. This is a common and understandable step for a group involved in an anti-colonial political project, as is the case of jihadi men (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1991). In other instances, different smaller articulations were important, such as when talking about the internal power dynamic between men from Central Java, more marginal regions of the island, and other islands in the archipelago. At the same time, our participants would often resist a national perspective, preferring to talk about a transcendent Muslim community and experience. Although all of these differing articulations are true and tell us different things about the gender dynamics at play, all of them are normative and reveal competing truths about what has occurred.

Where these notions of scale became most pointed is in interviews where relationships of oppression within the network are discussed. The hierarchies of gender that defined power relations often existed on multiple levels in any given location and time, meaning that the question of dominance in orderings of gender is as much a normative/political question as an empirical one (Marston Reference Marston2000). Here we draw from critical theory to suggest that as the question of scale is a normative/political question and that the choices made in research needs to be made actively and presented explicitly in how research is produced (Mundy Reference Mundy2011).

While the account we have presented has been focussed on the foreign fighter phenomena, and on the life-history of one particular foreign fighter, we suggest that the analysis presented on methodological nationalism and the politics of scale have similar implications to state militaries. The recent turn towards studying marginalized masculinities in the Global North has emphasized the various contestations that challenge ‘neat’ accounts of men’s desire to emulate a singular hegemonic masculinity (Tidy and Chisholm Reference Tidy and Chisholm2017). Adopting a politics of scale will provide those studying militarized masculinities a new tool for uncovering the complex overlapping relationships of power that structure military practice.

It is for all of these reasons that we suggest adopting what Cynthia Enloe (2004) has referred to as ‘feminist curiosity’ towards the politics of scale within feminist IR. By challenging our default position of the nation-state, and adopting a more curious, and ultimately intentional, approach to the best units of analysis for exploring masculinities we feel that feminist IR may be better positioned to uncovering the workings of gender in structuring war. All of this is not to suggest an abandonment of the nation-state as a useful object of analysis. But, that by taking a leaf out of our anthropologist’s peers’ textbooks and becoming less disciplined by our IR’s preoccupation with the nation, we might gain a richer understanding of how gender makes collective violence possible.