Introduction
Since the territorial defeat of the Islamic State (ISIS), scholarly and policy debates have focused overwhelmingly on the problem of return. Questions of repatriation, prosecution, rehabilitation, and ongoing security risk have dominated analyses of ISIS-affiliated citizens from Western states. Within this literature, media representations have been shown to matter deeply, shaping public perceptions of threat, legitimacy, and state responsibility. However, one outcome of the post-caliphate period has received remarkably little sustained attention: the deaths of ISIS-affiliated citizens, and the ways these deaths are publicly narrated. What do these representations do politically? Do these narratives perform a security function?
Death would appear, at first glance, to resolve the security problem. Deceased individuals cannot return, cannot be prosecuted, and cannot pose future threat. However, as this article shows, the deaths of ISIS-affiliated citizens go further than simply closing political debate. They generate new forms of regulation, operating through media representation to legitimise state authority, manage citizenship, and resolve the politically fraught dilemmas that return would otherwise force into view. Importantly, these processes are inherently gendered, as has been the case for media reporting on living ISIS members.Footnote 1 Not only are men and women represented differently in death, but their deaths also serve different governing functions within national security narratives.
Indeed, feminist security studies (FSS) has long demonstrated that war, counterterrorism, and political violence are structured through gendered assumptions about threat, agency, and protection, in which men are routinely associated with violence and danger, while women are framed through vulnerability, morality, or exceptional deviance.Footnote 2 Alongside this, critical analyses have established that reporting on terrorism is not simply descriptive but actively participates in the production of security realities. For instance, ISIS-related reporting is deeply gendered, with men framed as security threats and women narrated through moralised registers of innocence, deviance, or betrayal, even where their actions are comparable.Footnote 3
What remains underexplored, however, is how these gendered dynamics operate upon death. To fill this gap, this article presents a comparative, gendered analysis of media representations of deceased ISIS-affiliated citizens in Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), and France. It asks the role of death in contemporary counterterrorism, and how that work differs for men and women. By examining who is reported, how deaths are framed, and what meanings are attached to them, the article shows how states continue to regulate ISIS affiliation beyond life, using death to manage citizenship, security, and the political dilemmas posed by return.
Empirically, the study draws on a qualitative analysis of 287 media articles on the deaths of ISIS-affiliated citizens across the three cases. These cases were selected because they share comparable counterterrorism concerns while differing significantly in legal tools, repatriation policies, and citizenship regimes. Australia’s comparatively constrained citizenship revocation powers, the UK’s expansive deprivation framework, and France’s emphasis on republican cohesion and judicial authority provide distinct contexts through which death is translated into security closure.
Ultimately, the article advances three core arguments. First, the regulation of ISIS affiliation does not end at death. Second, this closure is achieved through different strategies: visibility in Australia, legality in the UK, and ambiguity in France. Third, gender structures how death resolves regulatory dilemmas. Thus, we contribute a new perspective to debates on counterterrorism, citizenship, and security by focusing on death rather than return and showing that death is not a terminal event but rather an active component of contemporary security regimes.Footnote 4
Gender, citizenship, and grievability in security governance
Feminist security studies
FSS has long challenged the assumption that security is gender neutral, demonstrating instead that war, counterterrorism, and political violence are structured through deeply embedded gendered norms about threat, agency, and protection.Footnote 5 Within this literature, gender is understood as not an attribute of individuals but rather a governing logic that shapes how insecurity is defined, how responsibility is assigned, and how violence is rendered intelligible. These insights are central to understanding how states respond to citizens associated with terrorist violence, both in life and after death.
A core contribution of FSS is the demonstration that masculinity and femininity function as organising principles within security discourse. Men are routinely associated with intentional violence, danger, and culpability, while women are framed through registers of vulnerability, morality, or exceptional deviance.Footnote 6 These gendered expectations shape how participation in violence is interpreted, as well as how security responses are justified. For instance, Seal’s analysis identifies a range of recurring representations, including the masculine woman, the damaged personality, the witch, and the respectable woman, through which female violence is rendered intelligible and contained.Footnote 7 These categories share with Sjoberg and Gentry’s Mothers, Monsters, Whores an underlying concern with exceptionalising or disciplining women’s violence when it exceeds normative femininity.
These representations have material consequences. Feminist scholars have demonstrated that gendered constructions of the nation, the enemy, and political violence help to determine which counterterrorism responses appear legitimate, necessary, and permissible.Footnote 8 In the context of ISIS-affiliated citizens, media and policy discourses consistently reproduce gendered binaries between violent male fighters and misguided or deviant women, structuring who is perceived as redeemable, who is punishable, and who remains intelligible as a subject of regulation.Footnote 9 By extending FSS insights into the terrain of death, we treat gender as not a descriptive variable but rather a constitutive element of post-conflict security.
Citizenship
Critical work on citizenship and counterterrorism provides a second foundation for analysing how death functions as a governing outcome. This literature demonstrates that contemporary counterterrorism increasingly operates through practices of exclusion, whereby citizenship is transformed from a stable legal status into a conditional and revocable privilege.Footnote 10 Measures such as citizenship deprivation, offshore detention, and non-repatriation have become central tools through which states manage perceived security threats posed by their own nationals.Footnote 11
These practices are not merely legal responses to terrorism but also forms of security that reshape the boundaries of political community. Citizenship deprivation, in particular, allows states to displace responsibility outward, rendering certain individuals governable only through distance, abandonment, or elimination.Footnote 12 As Prabhat and Park contend, such practices do not simply remove legal protection but also reconstitute citizenship as conditional, structured by assessments of worthiness, loyalty, and conformity.Footnote 13
The conditionality of citizenship is not experienced uniformly. Research examining citizenship deprivation in counterterrorism has demonstrated that Muslim citizens are disproportionately positioned as contingent members of the national community, rendering their citizenship more precarious and revocable in moments of perceived security crisis.Footnote 14 As Williamson and Khiabany argue, forms of ‘gendered race thinking’ can situate Muslim women outside the political community and beyond the full protection of the law.Footnote 15 Citizenship therefore functions as not merely a legal status but also a differentiated form of political membership shaped by racialised assessments of loyalty, belonging, and threat.
This article asks how these logics extend beyond death. Citizenship does not cease to matter when individuals die abroad. Whether a deceased individual is named, mourned, moralised, or erased depends on how their citizenship status has been perceived and how their death can be aligned with prevailing security narratives. In this vein, we show that death operates as a continuation rather than a termination of citizenship. States do not simply withdraw protection and step back. They rely on death – confirmed, ambiguous, or unacknowledged – to justify contested counterterrorism choices and foreclose the political challenges posed by return. Media representations play a crucial role in this process.
Grievability
Gendered conceptions of security ultimately shape how states grieve, or refuse to grieve, the deceased. The concept of grievability provides a useful lens through which to understand how political violence operates through discursive frames that determine which lives are recognised as worth living and, consequently, worthy of mourning. Butler examines the conditions under which certain deaths are apprehended as losses while others are rendered disposable or already lost.Footnote 16 For Butler, mourning is fundamentally political. The possibility of being mourned depends upon whether a life is recognised as belonging to a collective ‘us’. Political violence therefore operates through not only physical force but also discursive and affective processes that shape recognition, belonging, and abandonment. Silence, non-recognition, and ungrievability constitute forms of violence that reinforce the boundaries of political and social community.
This article intervenes in existing scholarship by demonstrating that the way the deaths of ISIS-affiliated citizens are represented in the media is directly shaped by their grievability. As the three cases examined demonstrate, certain lives, specifically those of citizens who joined ISIS, are constructed as non-grievable and disposable. These individuals are symbolically positioned outside the boundaries of political and social belonging, outside of the collective ‘us’, resulting in their exclusion from the affective and symbolic domain of legitimate mourning. Furthermore, grievability, like citizenship, is imbued with racial hierarchies. Recognition, protection, and belonging are often differentially allocated through racialised assumptions regarding loyalty, threat, and national membership.Footnote 17 Thus, representations of ISIS-affiliated citizens reveal significant gendered and racialised dimensions, insofar as cognitive and discursive biases at times render women more grievable than men, despite their shared inscription within figures of radical alterity.
Discourse and the governance of death
This framework also integrates Antoine Mégie’s (2010) concept of the ‘terrorist scene’. Instead of viewing terrorism as a fixed or objective category, Mégie conceptualises it as a dynamic configuration of interactions among multiple actors, including state actors, the media, and civil society.Footnote 18 Within this framework, institutional responses and public discourses are conceptualised as products of ongoing interactions between state actors and civil society, which are significantly influenced and mediated by the media.
Although Mégie recently expanded this concept to analyse the dynamics shaping the French institutional and public response following the 2015 attacks, its application to the present research is particularly valuable for examining the relationship between media coverage and governmental discourse.Footnote 19 This includes not only how government policy shapes media narratives but also how media coverage actively contributes to constructing the discourses through which state actors interpret and publicly frame phenomena such as the deaths of ISIS members.
Thus, media coverage is regarded as not merely a reflection of pre-existing public opinion but also a constitutive force in the broader discursive process through which governments, institutions, and publics collectively generate meaning regarding terrorism and its governance.
Methods
This article employs a comparative qualitative analysis of media representations of deceased ISIS-affiliated citizens in Australia, the UK, and France.Footnote 20 The study focuses on cases where death became publicly mediatised, on the premise that visibility is a key mechanism of security.
Case identification and scope
The analysis proceeded in three stages. First, preliminary scoping research was conducted to identify ISIS-affiliated citizens from Australia, the UK, and France whose deaths were reported in national media. This resulted in a list of deceased individuals for each country, including approximate dates of death and the circumstances under which death was first reported. The focus on mediatised deaths reflects the article’s core interest in how state action operates through public narration rather than private or undisclosed outcomes.
Second, a purposive sample of mainstream national media outlets was selected for each country to capture variation across political orientation while maintaining comparability. Outlets were grouped broadly across partisan left, left-leaning, centrist, right-leaning, and partisan right positions. In Australia, this included outlets such as the Guardian, the Conversation, ABC News, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, and the Daily Telegraph. In the UK, the sample included the Guardian, the Independent, BBC News, the Telegraph, the Sun, and the Daily Mail. In France, the dataset comprised Médiapart, Libération, Le Monde, Le Parisien, L’Express, 20 Minutes, Le Point, France Info, Le Figaro, and CNews. While the number of outlets varies across countries, this reflects differences in media concentration rather than analytical imbalance.
Third, articles were collected using the Factiva database. For each individual, searches were limited to a window of one month before and one month after the first reported confirmation of death. This temporal boundary was designed to capture initial framing and immediate narrative justification, while minimising duplication through anniversary reporting or later retrospective commentary. Only articles that directly referenced (presumed) death were retained for analysis.
Data coding and analysis
The final dataset comprised 287 articles across the three cases. Articles were imported into NVivo and analysed using an inductive coding strategy. Initial open coding identified recurring narrative patterns related to threat construction, citizenship status, legality, morality, family, responsibility, and security justification. Through iterative comparison within and across cases, these codes were refined into a set of dominant frames specific to each national context.
The analysis was conducted separately for Australia, the UK, and France to preserve contextual specificity before comparative synthesis. Particular attention was paid to how gender structured framing in terms of not only representation but also what political and security work death did. Coding therefore focused on both descriptive content and functional effects, including whether death was framed as resolution, justification, ambiguity, or disruption.
In the following sections, we present the findings from this analysis.
Australia
Australia presents a distinctive case in the politics of how ISIS-affiliated citizens’ deaths are rendered visible. Australia’s limited legal capacity to denationalise citizens means the state remains formally tied to its nationals, even in death. The media thus operates as an important compensatory role, narrating death as moral closure and reaffirming the state’s protective authority.
As shown in Table 1, across eighty-five media articles covering the deaths of seven Australian nationals affiliated with ISIS, men account for 72.9 per cent of coverage (n = 62), while women account for 27.1 per cent (n = 23). On a per-person basis, women’s deaths attract nearly twice as many articles as those of men, suggesting that female deaths are understood primarily not in relation to security risk but rather as narratives through which ideas of citizenship and belonging are negotiated.
Distribution of Australian media coverage on deceased ISIS members (by gender and narrative frame).
Table 1 Long description
Coverage is grouped by Gender and Name, with a Frame Category, Articles count, percent within Gender Group, percent of Total out of 85, and Key Thematic Emphasis. Men are listed as n 5 with 62 total articles across two frame categories. For men, Irredeemable Villain covers Mohamed Elomar, Ezzit Raad, Tareq Kamleh, Khaled Sharrouf, and Neil Prakash, with 55 articles, 88.7 percent within the men group, and 64.7 percent of the total, with key thematic emphasis, Absolute Condemnation. For men, Intelligence Trophy covers Khaled Sharrouf and Neil Prakash, with 7 articles, 11.3 percent within the men group, and 8.2 percent of the total, with key thematic emphasis, Deaths as Evidence of Efficacy. Women are listed as n 2 with 23 total articles across two frame categories. For women, Good Girl Gone Bad covers Amira Karroum, with 9 articles, 39.1 percent within the women group, and 10.6 percent of the total, with key thematic emphasis, Combination of Sympathy and Condemnation. For women, The Family Responsibility Case covers Tara Nettleton, with 14 articles, 60.9 percent within the women group, and 16.5 percent of the total, with key thematic emphasis, Familial Framing.
The articles were coded into four dominant frames across eight-five reports on the deaths of seven Australian citizens affiliated with ISIS: five men and two women. Men accounted for 73 per cent (n = 62) of the total coverage, distributed across two frames: 1) ‘irredeemable villains’ (88.7 per cent) and 2) ‘intelligence trophies’ (11.3 per cent). Women, by contrast, accounted for 27 per cent (n = 23) of total articles, concentrated in two frames: 1) ‘good girls gone bad’ (39.1 per cent) and 2) ‘the family responsibility case’ (60.9 per cent).
These patterns demonstrate how Australian reporting on ISIS deaths reproduces certain assumptions about gender, visibility, and the regulation of citizenship. Male deaths are primarily mobilised to showcase the efficacy and decisiveness of counterterrorism measures, converting loss into evidence of state control. Female deaths, by contrast, invite interpretive reflection on welfare, responsibility, and policy response – sites where the state re-enters through management instead of enforcement. In both cases, gender operates as the structuring logic through which citizenship and security are defined: men’s deaths reaffirm the legitimacy of coercive authority, while women’s deaths test the state’s capacity for care and containment.
As we show in the subsequent section, this pattern contrasts with the UK, where expansive citizenship revocation powers render many ISIS members legally and narratively invisible. Australia’s more limited legal capacity to revoke citizenship keeps nationals under formal state jurisdiction, compelling their deaths to be publicly explained.
The irredeemable villain
The category of the ‘irredeemable villain’ dominates Australian coverage of male deaths, accounting for nearly nine out of ten articles concerning men. The ‘irredeemable villains’ are depicted as embodiments of absolute moral corruption. Reports repeatedly described them as ‘monsters’,Footnote 21 ‘reviled jihadists’,Footnote 22 and ‘Australia’s most notorious terrorists’Footnote 23 that ‘no Australian would mourn’.Footnote 24 Their deaths are presented as not tragedy but rather justice – the necessary conclusion of abandoning Australia for ISIS.
Mohamed Elomar’s coverage (twenty articles) is particularly instructive. Headlines such as ‘pure evil Australian terrorist killed’ combine celebration and the elimination of a national threat.Footnote 25 In six reports, his treatment of women within ISIS is explicitly mentioned, amplifying his villainy through gendered violence. Reports linked him to gendered violence, noting that he ‘sold Yazidi women as slaves’ and ‘posted images of their treatment’ online.Footnote 26 Interestingly, his death was also linked to debates on citizenship reform, with one report observing that it ‘spared the government from having to decide on charges or return’, a rationale that ‘formed the basis for the Abbott government’s citizenship changes’, allowing dual nationals to ‘disqualify themselves from citizenship’ by supporting terrorist organisations.Footnote 27 Together, these reports demonstrate how the representation of Elomar’s death served to legitimise the state’s evolving powers of exclusion, delineating the boundaries of acceptable citizenship.
Khaled Sharrouf’s death in 2017 received similar treatment. The home affairs minister’s remark that ‘no one will mourn Sharrouf’ circulated widely, functioning as a clear statement of ungrievability. Such phrasing framed his death as overdue, reinforcing his portrayal as a figure beyond redemption.Footnote 28
The intelligence trophy
A smaller but significant subset of articles (11 per cent) treats death as bureaucratic triumph rather than moral reckoning. The ‘intelligence trophy’ frame appears primarily in coverage of Neil Prakash and, to a lesser extent, Khaled Sharrouf. Prakash’s death was initially misreported after he was ‘reported to have been killed in Syria’, before reports later confirmed that he had been captured alive by joint Turkish and Australian forces.Footnote 29 Subsequent coverage shifted focus from his individual culpability to state performance, emphasising that Australian intelligence played a key role in tracking and identifying Prakash.Footnote 30 This transition recast the event from moral judgement to institutional validation: that his capture shows Australia’s intelligence networks working exactly as intended.Footnote 31 Similarly, reporting on Sharrouf’s death continuously emphasised how ‘Australian intelligence agencies played a key role’ in the planning of a US airstrike in Syria that killed Sharrouf.Footnote 32
Prakash’s and Sharrouf’s cases illustrate how media narratives can pivot from depicting death as justice to portraying survival as an operational success, depending on its alignment with policy objectives. Here, death becomes data: an outcome to be verified, a metric of operational success. Even when life persists, as in Prakash’s case, survival does not restore personhood; it becomes a measure of the state’s surveillance and reach.
The good girl gone bad
Women’s deaths disrupt this procedural certainty. The first female category, ‘good girl gone bad’, is exemplified by Amira Karroum. Karroum is framed as both a security concern and a subject of limited empathy. Reports described her as ‘sweet and caring’Footnote 33 and a ‘beautiful, bubbly, and always happy’ student who ‘never wore a burqa’ during her school years.Footnote 34 Yet this humanising portrayal coexists with her positioning as a threat – ‘The Gold Coast female extremist shot and dismembered in Syria’Footnote 35 and ‘The Coast woman who took up arms for Allah’.Footnote 36
The emphasis that Karroum had ‘never worn a burqa’ before travelling to Syria is particularly revealing. Such descriptions do more than provide biographical detail. They also invoke racialised and gendered assumptions about what constitutes an acceptable Muslim identity, positioning Karroum as someone who had previously appeared integrated, moderate, and therefore intelligible within Australian society. Her radicalisation is consequently narrated as a dramatic departure from normative expectations of both femininity and Muslim belonging. This framing reflects broader tendencies within media discourse to distinguish between acceptable and threatening Muslim identities through visible markers of conformity and difference.Footnote 37
Karroum is thus represented through a dual logic. She is simultaneously intelligible as a radicalised subject and condemnable as a national defector. The reporting allows for limited sympathy, acknowledging her vulnerability to influence while maintaining her culpability. This framing contrasts sharply with male counterparts, whose deaths are rendered as categorical victories. Karroum’s representation, by contrast, situates her within a framework of risk and prevention, suggesting that female radicalisation is a social failure to be corrected rather than an intrinsic danger to be eradicated. Her death reaffirms the idea that women’s engagement in political violence must be explained and contained, while men’s simply confirms the legitimacy of state force.
The family responsibility case
The ‘family responsibility case’ frame, which dominates coverage of Tara Nettleton, transforms death into a story of domestic redemption. Nettleton, wife to Khaled Sharrouf, died of appendicitis in Syria in 2015. Her own death is described in muted terms, with reporting not going much further than stating that she had ‘died in Syria’.Footnote 38
Indeed, unlike male ISIS members, Nettleton’s death did not mark a counterterrorism success but instead generated administrative and ethical questions about what should happen to her five orphaned children. Reports described how she had ‘died…from infection and complications following surgery for appendicitis’.Footnote 39 This medicalised account positioned her death as incidental and apolitical, allowing focus to shift to her mother’s (Karen Nettleton) subsequent campaign to recover the grandchildren.
Media coverage followed Karen Nettleton’s repeated attempts to reach Syria, often highlighting the logistical and diplomatic complexities involved. Articles reported that ‘the mother of deceased ISIS bride Tara Nettleton has gone to Syria to collect her five grandchildren’Footnote 40 and that she had coordinated with Australian officials before her ‘mercy dash to Turkey’.Footnote 41 The story became less about terrorism and more about state procedure: meetings with the Australian federal police and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade were cited as evidence of active coordination, even as success remained uncertain. When her first attempt failed, Karen told the ABC, ‘I’m not going to leave them here. Don’t underestimate the determination of this nanna.’Footnote 42
Through this coverage, Tara Nettleton’s death became a site through which the state’s responsibilities were re-evaluated. Her mother’s determination and the government’s partial involvement transformed the episode into a test of Australia’s administrative and moral capacity to manage the consequences of exclusion. Reporting consistently framed the situation as a policy challenge, marking a shift from the politics of counterterrorism to those of humanitarian governance. Nettleton’s death therefore functioned less as closure than as an inflection point: an event through which the boundaries of protection, care, and citizenship were renegotiated under the gaze of both media and state institutions.
Gendered visibility and the security work of death
In Australia, death emerges as a governing solution to the problem of return under conditions of constrained citizenship revocation. Because many male ISIS members remained Australian citizens at the time of their deaths, those deaths required public narration. Media reporting does this work by rendering death as retrospective confirmation that non-repatriation was prudent, necessary, and effective. Extensive coverage of male deaths constructs them as irredeemable security threats whose elimination validates the state’s decision to abandon responsibility rather than confront the institutional and political burdens of return. By contrast, the relative absence of reporting on women’s deaths reflects their limited utility within this closure logic. Women do not easily resolve security dilemmas through death, as their cases reintroduce questions of care, family, and administrative responsibility. The Australian case therefore shows how death is mobilised unevenly as a security outcome, with visibility operating as a compensatory mechanism where legal erasure is unavailable and gender shaping which deaths can credibly deliver closure.
United Kingdom
Across eighty-three media articles covering the deaths of seven British nationals affiliated with ISIS (five men and two women), distinct gendered patterns emerge in visibility, framing, and moral interpretation. While men constitute the majority of those who died, women’s deaths attract disproportionately greater narrative attention. As shown in Table 2, thirty-one articles (37.3 per cent) report on two women, while fifty-two articles (62.7 per cent) concern five men. On a per-person basis, each woman’s death attracts over 50 per cent more coverage than each man. This pattern reflects broader media tendencies in which women’s deaths often attract disproportionate attention, or ‘hypervisibility’, due to their perceived departure from gendered expectations regarding violence and victimhood.Footnote 43
Distribution of UK media coverage on deceased ISIS members (by gender and narrative frame).
Table 2 Long description
Rows are grouped by Gender, with columns for Name, Frame Category, Articles, percent within gender group, percent of total out of 83, and Key Thematic Emphasis. Men are listed as 5 individuals with 52 articles total across three frame categories. For men, Political Scapegoats names Reyaad Khan, Ruhul Amin, and Mohamed Emwazi with 34 articles, 65.4 percent within the men group, and 41.0 percent of the total, with key thematic emphasis, Legality and Executive Power. Ultimate Villain names Mohamed Emwazi, Ruhul Amin, and Reyaad Khan with 8 articles, 15.4 percent within the men group, and 9.6 percent of the total, with key thematic emphasis, Hyper Masculinity. Prison Disposables names Ishak Mostefaoui and Abdel Majed Abdel Bary with 10 articles, 19.2 percent within the men group, and 12.0 percent of the total, with key thematic emphasis, Administrative Erasure. Women are listed as 2 individuals with 31 articles total across two frame categories. For women, Poster Girl Villain names Sally Anne Jones with 19 articles, 61.3 percent within the women group, and 22.9 percent of the total, with key thematic emphasis, Deviant Femininity. The Groomed names Kadiza Sultana with 12 articles, 38.7 percent within the women group, and 14.5 percent of the total, with key thematic emphasis, Innocence and Manipulation.
The articles were coded into five dominant frames across eighty-three reports on the deaths of seven British citizens (past and present) affiliated with ISIS: five men and two women. Of these, men accounted for 62.7 per cent (n = 52) of the total coverage, distributed across three frames: 1) ‘political scapegoats’ (65.4 per cent of male coverage); 2) ‘ultimate villains’ (15.4 per cent); and 3) ‘prison disposables’ (19.2 per cent). Women, by contrast, accounted for 37.3 per cent (n = 31) of total articles, concentrated in two gendered frames: 1) ‘poster-girl villain’ (61.3 per cent of female coverage) and 2) ‘the groomed’ (38.7 per cent).
These patterns reveal that male deaths are structured around legality and the performance of state authority, where ideas of restraint, control, and procedural legitimacy dominate. Their ungrievability arises not from hostility but rather from bureaucratic closure, as legality itself becomes the condition that finalises their exclusion. Female deaths, in contrast, remain discursively active. They are narrated through frames that move between deviance and vulnerability, positioning women as figures whose actions require interpretation rather than suppression. This distinction reflects the gendered architecture of British security. Men’s deaths consolidate the authority of the state, while women’s deaths expose the limits of its moral and procedural reach.
The pattern stands in contrast to Australia, where male deaths dominate through spectacle and repetition. This reflects how Australia’s limited legal capacity for citizenship revocation keeps its nationals formally within state jurisdiction, requiring their deaths to be repeatedly justified in public. By contrast, the UK’s expansive powers of deprivation, coupled with a deeply embedded intelligence culture, produce a quieter form of exclusion. Many British ISIS members become legally and narratively invisible. The result is a politics of erasure in which men’s deaths disappear from public consciousness, while women’s deaths remain morally legible.
The ultimate villain
Mohamed Emwazi, otherwise known as Jihadi John, is framed as an ‘ultimate villain’. He is the only man depicted as a true monster from beginning to end. The UK media covered his every move, including his death, to reinforce the necessity of counterterrorism policies and justify security actions such as drone strikes.
His death was described as a ‘flawless drone missile strike’ that ‘evaporated’ Emwazi near the Raqqa clock tower ‘where ISIS staged public executions’.Footnote 44 Both US and UK officials framed the strike as an act of ‘self-defence’ against a man who had ‘inspired individuals to join their cause’ worldwide.Footnote 45 The narrative of precision and inevitability replaced any sense of legal or ethical uncertainty. As one editorial concluded, ‘Jihadi John had to be killed…the chances of capturing him and putting him on trial would have been slim to the point of irrelevance’.Footnote 46
The coverage was quite forensic. One report noted that ‘four young men were in the car, including a British citizen who was a very senior figure…there were a lot of [body] parts’.Footnote 47 Such descriptions translated human death into evidence of operational success. Other reports listed his crimes in exhaustive detail: ‘a British citizen [who] participated in the videos showing the murders of US journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley…British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning…and a number of other hostages’.Footnote 48 These lists underscored his symbolic role as the ultimate manifestation of the domestic terrorist threat, transforming his death into proof of both deterrence and control.
In this context, Emwazi’s Britishness is acknowledged only to mark its erasure. His citizenship operates as a site of disavowal, or proof of what the state has overcome rather than what it possesses. By eliminating him, the state seemingly restores national integrity, reaffirming the reach of its authority and the legitimacy of its transnational force. The ‘ultimate villain’ frame therefore functions as a justifying narrative for the security state. It converts a citizen’s killing into a demonstration of procedural competence and the inevitability of counterterrorism violence, presenting eradication as not an exception but rather the logical endpoint of securitised governance.
The political scapegoats
The second major frame in the reporting of deceased UK male ISIS members is the ‘political scapegoats’, used primarily to describe Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin. Their deaths were framed less as counterterrorism successes and more as moments of political controversy. Media coverage focused overwhelmingly on then Prime Minister David Cameron’s authorisation of drone strikes against them in 2015 – the first time the UK had killed its own citizens without parliamentary approval.
Headlines framed the strike as ‘a major departure for the UK’, questioning whether the killing of citizens abroad was lawful and whether Cameron’s government was ‘slowly creeping towards taking the UK fully into the conflict’ in Syria.Footnote 49 Coverage foregrounded the constitutional stakes of the event. Reports noted that ‘the attack raises an immediate issue…over whether the killing of its citizens in such a way is lawful’, and whether it represents ‘state-sanctioned killing without trial’.Footnote 50 Some defended Cameron’s decision as ‘decisive action’ that fulfilled his ‘duty to protect citizens’,Footnote 51 while others described it as ‘mission creep’ and evidence of a government ‘abandoning the belief that deliberate killing is wrong under any circumstances’.Footnote 52
Across these accounts, Khan and Amin are transformed from security threats into case studies of state power. Their ungrievability arises not from public hostility but rather from procedural abstraction: they exist primarily as evidence in a constitutional debate. As one editorial concluded, ‘the first duty of government is to protect its citizens even where that involves slaughtering some among them’.Footnote 53 The striking absence of biographical detail – no family interviews, no community context – further depersonalises their deaths.
The ‘political scapegoats’ frame thus reveals how legality and executive power operate as key organising logics in the narration of death. By displacing the individual and foregrounding the institutional, these reports reframe the killing of citizens as a technical question of policy rather than a moral or humanitarian concern. Male death becomes a mechanism through which the state reasserts its institutional legitimacy, demonstrating its ability to act decisively, justify legally, and contain politically the uncertainties of counterterrorism violence.
The prison disposables
The ‘prison disposables’ frame captures the most direct form of erasure. Both Ishak Mostefaoui and Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary died in overseas detention, Mostefaoui in a Kurdish-run prison in Syria and Bary in a Spanish facility, after being stripped of their British citizenship. Their deaths were only confirmed through foreign outlets (and later carried over to the UK, with minimal coverage), reinforcing the notion that once citizenship is deprived, these individuals no longer fall within the state’s moral or political jurisdiction.
Reporting on both men was sparse and factual. Mostefaoui was described simply as ‘a British student who ran away to join [ISIS] in Syria’ and ‘died while being held in prison’.Footnote 54 Other accounts noted that he ‘died either trying to escape custody or amid serious disorder’,Footnote 55 with Kurdish sources adding that he was ‘killed as he attempted to break out of al-Sinaa prison’.Footnote 56 Even when humanising details emerged, such as his statement from prison that ‘I regret everything I’ve done. I want to start a new page’, it was reported without further commentary.Footnote 57 His death, like many others who lost citizenship, appeared as an administrative fact, not a national loss.
Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary’s coverage followed the same pattern. Reports stated that ‘a man from London who was stripped of his British nationality over his links to [ISIS] has died in custody in Spain’.Footnote 58 There were no political statements, family reactions, or calls for investigation.
Neither Mostefaoui’s nor Bary’s Britishness invites reflection on state responsibility. Both are treated as if their legal erasure preceded their physical disappearance. The relative absence of such stories compared with Australia is telling. In the UK, citizenship deprivation is more readily deployed, and as a result, many who die abroad as former citizens fall outside the remit of national reporting. This absence should be read as not mere disinterest but rather evidence of how legal exclusion produces narrative exclusion. Deaths that occur beyond citizenship boundaries no longer demand justification or acknowledgement. They simply confirm the success of the exclusionary apparatus that rendered them disposable in the first place.
The poster-girl villain
Sally-Anne Jones is the only woman in the UK dataset to receive the same ‘pure villain’ framing as Mohamed Emwazi. Jones was portrayed as both threat and spectacle, with her gender and nationality amplifying her visibility within the UK press. Across nineteen articles, she was consistently labelled ‘the world’s most wanted woman’, ‘a hate-filled psychopath’, and ‘the White Widow’, her notoriety functioning as a public justification for targeted killing.Footnote 59
Media coverage foregrounded her active role in ISIS operations. Reports noted that she ‘used her social media accounts to recruit women to ISIS’ and ‘provided practical advice on how to travel to Syria’.Footnote 60 Others emphasised that she ‘encouraged women to commit terror attacks’ and had been placed on ‘a US high-priority hit list’.Footnote 61 Her death was widely reported as ‘a significant kill in the war against ISIS’,Footnote 62 confirming her transformation from citizen to symbolic enemy.
While Jones’s male counterparts were discussed primarily through legality or executive power, her death was narrated through personality and spectacle. She was described as ‘wicked’, ‘blonde-haired’, and ‘prolific on social media’, a woman whose ‘wish [was] to behead Christians with a nice blunt knife’, encapsulating both religious fanaticism and gendered deviance.Footnote 63 Headlines such as ‘Blonde Bombshell’Footnote 64 and ‘Wicked White Widow killed in drone attack’Footnote 65 reveal how her femininity was made inseparable from her perceived corruption. Jones’s visibility also reveals the racialised dimensions of security discourse. Her whiteness and Britishness rendered her participation in ISIS particularly shocking and newsworthy, reflecting the perceived incongruity between dominant expectations of national belonging and her embrace of violent extremism. The emphasis on her race, motherhood, and relationship to her husband Junaid Hussain rendered her not only a terrorist but also a moral aberration – someone who had violated the boundaries of proper womanhood.
Jones’s case thus demonstrates how female agency within extremist violence is framed as exceptional and unforgivable. Her death was treated as a necessary act of cleansing rather than loss, confirming that women who embody ideological commitment cannot be rendered grievable within UK security discourse. In doing so, her reporting reinforces the boundaries of citizenship and belonging: some deaths are grievable precisely because they symbolise exclusion, while others – such as those of men stripped of citizenship – fade quietly from the record.
The groomed
The final frame, the ‘groomed’, centres on Kadiza Sultana, whose death was narrated through language of innocence and manipulation. Across twelve reports, she was described as ‘a bright student’, ‘a victim of brainwashing’, and ‘a lost schoolgirl’.Footnote 66 Her story embodies what might be called a feminised security logic that constructs women as not agents but rather naive subjects requiring protection.
Sultana’s trajectory from ‘gifted student’ to ‘jihadi bride’ was depicted as a tragic cautionary tale. Media coverage focused on her pre-departure identity as ‘a straight-A student…lured by ISIS propaganda’,Footnote 67 and her later ‘disillusionment with life under ISIL’ before being ‘killed in an airstrike in Raqqa’.Footnote 68 Reports emphasised her regret and desire to return home, quoting her family’s lawyer, who said escaping ISIS was ‘like trying to escape from Alcatraz’.Footnote 69 The imagery of entrapment and helplessness absolved both her and the British state of moral responsibility, shifting the narrative from culpability to victimhood.
Interestingly, her death was widely framed as both tragedy and lesson. Statements such as ‘how we can stop more girls following in the footsteps of Kadiza’ turned her story into a policy parable about the dangers of online grooming.Footnote 70 Articles concluded that she had been ‘brainwashed online’ and that her death ‘renewed criticism of the Government for failing to crack down on the radicalisation of British Muslims’.Footnote 71 The focus on prevention thus reoriented the narrative away from foreign policy critique, instead reinforcing the legitimacy of domestic counter-radicalisation measures like the Prevent programme.
Thus, Sultana’s death has a distinct political function. Whereas the deaths of men justified the necessity of state violence, her story justified the necessity of state protection. Sympathy for her loss translated into not accountability but rather renewed trust in the protective capacities of government. The moral question became not why she died, but how others could be prevented from meeting the same fate.
The ‘groomed’ frame ultimately reaffirms gendered hierarchies of security and citizenship. Sultana is grievable because she conforms to the ideal of feminine vulnerability; her victimhood humanises counterterrorism without challenging it. Her death repositions the state as a failed yet benevolent protector rather than a complicit actor, sustaining the moral boundaries through which women’s grievability – and by extension, belonging – are defined.
Gender, citizenship, and the management of death
Taken together, the UK findings show how death resolves the problem of return through legal severance rather than public narration. Broad citizenship deprivation powers allow the state to withdraw responsibility in advance, rendering many deaths administratively complete and politically unremarkable. Where death does surface in public discourse, it does so unevenly along gendered lines. Male deaths are absorbed into silence, their disappearance signalling the effectiveness of legal exclusion. Female deaths, by contrast, remain visible but tightly moralised, serving to reaffirm the state’s authority through either condemnation or compassion. In both cases, death functions less as an event to be accounted for than an outcome that justifies counterterrorism. The UK case therefore illustrates how citizenship deprivation transforms death into a mechanism of security closure, redistributing visibility and grievability in ways that preserve state authority while foreclosing the dilemmas that return would otherwise pose.
France
France presents a unique case in the politics of rendering ISIS-affiliated citizens’ deaths visible. The 2015 Paris attacks, followed by the 2016 Nice attack – which collectively claimed 234 lives – produced what Robert et al. characterise as a collective national trauma.Footnote 72 Within this context, media coverage performs a significant function: narrating death as moral closure for not only victims of jihadist violence but also French society more broadly.
Unlike Australia, where gender structures the moral interpretation of death, and the UK, where gender determines visibility itself, France applies a relatively gender-neutral framework of collective condemnation. Both men and women are constructed primarily as traitors to the nation whose betrayal supersedes gendered narratives of threat or vulnerability. This does not mean gender is irrelevant in French coverage; humanising elements appear more frequently for women, and the volume of coverage differs. However, the dominant narrative frames apply across gender with remarkable consistency.
This relative subordination of gender follows from the particular character of France’s experience of jihadist violence. Because the 2015 and 2016 attacks were considered a direct assault on national identity, public discourse became organised around a binary of belonging and betrayal in which loyalty to the nation was the overriding question. Within this frame, the gendered distinctions that elsewhere separate male threat from female vulnerability lose much of their interpretive force. National trauma reorganises these narratives, elevating collective betrayal above gender.
This construction of ISIS-affiliated citizens as traitors from within cannot be fully separated from France’s colonial and postcolonial history, and particularly from the long-standing figure of the Arab or Muslim man in the French political sphere. Representations of ISIS-affiliated citizens are shaped by longer histories of securitisation and republican anxieties over national belonging, through which Arab and Muslim men have been constructed in terms of internal threat, disorder, and failed assimilation. While a full postcolonial analysis lies beyond the scope of this article, these dynamics provide important context for understanding why narratives of betrayal assume such prominence within the French case.
Across 119 media articles covering the deaths of twenty-one French nationals affiliated with ISIS (seventeen men and four women), this pattern of gender-blind condemnation emerges clearly. Men accounted for 66 per cent (n = 79) of total coverage, while women accounted for 34 per cent (n = 40). Unlike in Australia or the UK, women continue to be constructed primarily as security threats and national traitors rather than subjects requiring humanitarian intervention or familial remediation.
The articles were coded into four dominant frames across 119 reports on the deaths of twenty-one French citizens affiliated with ISIS: seventeen men and four women. Men accounted for 66 per cent (n = 79) of total coverage, distributed across four frames: 1) the ‘neutralised’ (54.4 per cent); 2) the ‘posthumous trials’ (19 per cent); 3) the ‘haunting ghosts’ (3.8 per cent); and 4) the ‘living dead’ (22.8 per cent). Women appeared in forty articles (34 per cent of total coverage), distributed across three of these frames: 1) the ‘neutralised’ (52.5 per cent); 2) the ‘haunting ghosts’ (7.5 per cent); and 3) the ‘living dead’ (40 per cent). The distribution of women across frames closely mirrors that of men, with both genders predominantly appearing in the ‘neutralised’ and ‘living dead’ categories. This statistical pattern reinforces the central finding: that French coverage operates according to a logic of collective condemnation that transcends gender.
The neutralised
The ‘neutralised’ frame dominates French coverage of male deaths, accounting for 54.4 per cent, depicting them as having been neutralised by coalition forces. Unlike Australia, sensationalism is less pronounced. Instead, articles across the political spectrum typically adopt a detached tone – providing brief biographical recountings and reminders of charges held against the deceased.
Salah-Eddine Gourmat’s coverage is particularly instructive. Headlines such as ‘Salah-Eddine Gourmat, the last target’Footnote 73 and ‘November 13 attacks: Who are the two young ISIS leaders eliminated in Raqqa’Footnote 74 frame his death as the elimination of a national threat. Gourmat, suspected of involvement in the November 2015 Paris attacks, has his death portrayed in notably detached terms across all coverage.
Rachid Kassim’s coverage represents perhaps the most compelling case within this category. Kassim is positioned as one of France’s most prominent jihadist figures, frequently described as ‘most wanted in the world’Footnote 75 and ‘ISIS’ hangman’.Footnote 76 Headlines such as ‘the man who never stopped threatening France’Footnote 77 and ‘the death of the jihadist Rachid Kassim confirmed by DNA tests’Footnote 78 combine celebration with confirmation of threat elimination. His death is characterised as ‘an important victory for the coalition’,Footnote 79 noting that ‘Daesh’s cyber puppeteer’ has been ‘eliminated’.Footnote 80 This reporting demonstrates how Kassim’s death served to delineate the boundaries of acceptable citizenship and legitimise the state’s military intervention.
The Clain brothers, also prominent ISIS figures known for their roles as propagandists and for producing the audio recording in which ISIS claimed responsibility for the November 13 attacks, similarly fall within this category. Approximately half of the articles written about them recount their deaths in detached terms, restating charges held against them. Headlines such as ‘In Syria, the death of jihadist Fabien Clain confirmed by the international coalition’Footnote 81 present their deaths as overdue, effectively transforming loss into confirmation of coalition success.
The posthumous trials
The second category of articles holds significant symbolic weight: the ‘posthumous trials’. This category comprises men whose cases are exceptionally high-profile – what French discourse terms ‘les cas lourds’ – due to the severity and gravity of charges against them.Footnote 82 Within this frame, men’s deaths are narrated through a restorative justice perspective, conveying the message that even dead men cannot escape justice. All men in this category were tried in absentia, even when presumed dead.
Pending confirmation of their deaths, the Clain brothers were judged by default, as French counterterrorism courts determined their deaths had not been ‘formally proven’.Footnote 83 Much of the media coverage surrounding their posthumous trial appeared aligned with this judicial decision. Coverage emphasised that the brothers were ‘presumed dead’, that their deaths were not ‘formally proven’, and that sentencing them to ‘life imprisonment with a 22-year non-parole period’ constituted a ‘measure of cautiousness’.Footnote 84
Within this category, some men were confirmed dead yet still subjected to trial – as not a precautionary measure but rather an exercise in restorative justice. Sabri Essid, presumed dead since 2018, was tried post-mortem after France received evidence from Rojava demonstrating his active role in coordinating the genocide of the Yazidi community. This exceptional case attracted considerable media attention, notably because Essid became the first French ISIS fighter to be prosecuted for genocide. Essid is explicitly called a ‘terrorist’, with particular emphasis on his genocidal intent and acts against Yazidi women and children, including the rape and captivity of a Yazidi child for months.Footnote 85
The final male case fitting this category is Rachid Kassim, who was also tried in absentia following confirmation of his death. His post-mortem trial received substantial press justification, as the charges concerned ‘the decapitation of a hostage and death threats against two specialists of jihadism’.Footnote 86
Reporting on deaths within this category serves a dual purpose. First, it performs a function of restorative justice: the posthumous prosecutions signal France’s determination to hold perpetrators accountable beyond death. Second, this coverage issues a broader warning that accountability persists regardless of time, place, or circumstance.
The haunting ghosts
The ‘haunting ghosts’ category reflects the enduring trauma of the 2015 and 2016 attacks. Unlike the other frames, the ‘haunting ghosts’ remain in suspended animation: neither confirmed dead nor verified alive, they exist instead in a liminal state that generates profound public anxiety. This category comprises individuals whose uncertain status prevents collective mourning, prevents justice, and prevents closure, leaving them to haunt the French national imaginary as perpetual threats.
Rachid Kassim exemplifies this category most powerfully. As one of the most prominent French ISIS figures (as explored in the ‘neutralised’ frame), Kassim’s presumed but unconfirmed death in 2017 generated a particular form of media coverage that oscillated between relief and dread. The uncertainty surrounding his status is palpable in headlines such as ‘Rachid Kassim: A troubling shadow over the Roannais’.Footnote 87 More revealing still is the vocabulary employed to describe him during this period of uncertainty: Kassim is described as ‘a bloodthirsty ghost’ and ‘a malevolent spirit’,Footnote 88 whose yet-to-be-confirmed death would constitute ‘a relief’.Footnote 89 This spectral language is not merely metaphorical; it performs specific ideological work. By rendering Kassim as a ‘ghost’, media coverage transforms him from a human subject into a persistent threat that cannot be conclusively eliminated.
The living dead
The final male category, comprising 22.8 per cent of the article corpus, is the ‘living dead’. Borrowing Mbembe’s conceptualisation of the living dead, these men are categorised as such because they remain physically alive, yet are dead in all other respects: dead in the eyes of public opinion, dead in the eyes of the French state.Footnote 90
This category represents the eleven French jihadists (see Table 3) who were sentenced to death by hanging in 2019 by the Iraqi justice system. France maintained that Iraq, as a sovereign state, possessed the right to impose these sentences, arguing that if Iraq deemed a crime to have been committed on its territory, it retained authority to prosecute the perpetrators regardless of their nationality.
Distribution of French media coverage on deceased ISIS members (by gender and narrative frame).
Table 3 Long description
Counts and percentages of France media articles about deceased ISIS members are grouped by gender and narrative frame category, with columns for Articles, percent within gender group, percent of total out of 85, and key thematic emphasis. For men, listed as 79 articles, The Neutralised includes Boubakar El Hakim, Salah-Eddine Gourmat, Rachid Kassim, The Clain Brothers, and Sabri Essid, with 43 articles, 54.4 percent within the gender group, and 36.1 percent of the total, with key thematic emphasis, Elimination as security success. For men, The Haunting Ghost covers Rachid Kassim with 3 articles, 3.8 percent within gender, and 2.5 percent of total, with key thematic emphasis, Uncertainty of death as lingering threat. For men, Post-Humous Trials covers The Clain Brothers and Sabri Essid with 15 articles, 19.0 percent within gender, and 12.6 percent of total, with key thematic emphasis, Post-mortem accountability. For men, The Living Dead covers Leonard Lopez, Kevin Gonot, Mustapha Merzoughi, Salim Machou, Fodil Tahar Aouidate, Yassine Sakkam, Karam El Harchaoui, Brahim Nejara, Vianney Ouraghi, Mourad Delhomme, and Bilel Kabaoui with 18 articles, 22.8 percent within gender, and 15.1 percent of total, with key thematic emphasis, Social and political death. For women, listed as 40 articles, The Living Dead covers Melina Boughedir, Djamila Boutoutaou, and une Francaise with 31 articles, 77.5 percent within gender, and 26.0 percent of total, with key thematic emphasis, Biological survival but civic erasure. For women, The Haunting Ghost covers Hayat Boumedienne with 9 articles, 22.5 percent within gender, and 7.6 percent of total, with key thematic emphasis, Lingering national anxiety.
In the press, initial coverage adopted a neutral, descriptive tone, featuring headlines such as ‘Who are the 11 French jihadists sentenced to death in Iraq?’Footnote 91 As prosecutions proceeded in Iraq, headlines ceased naming individuals, instead describing them numerically and emphasising their erasure from French public consciousness.Footnote 92 Several articles detailed their ‘violent’ and ‘authoritarian’ characteristics, reinforcing that they were not innocent victims.Footnote 93
Subsequent coverage was sparse and largely confined to lawyers’ claims regarding torture, coerced confessions, and trial fairness.Footnote 94 These statements emphasised degrading and inhumane treatment, including physical torture such as ‘falaka’ and ‘waterboarding’.Footnote 95 However, even where such accounts humanised the detainees, reporting typically reiterated their involvement in terrorism, limiting the extent of sympathy afforded to them.
In this sense, the living dead function as a mechanism of posthumous governance. By allowing French citizens to remain biologically alive yet politically extinct, the state avoids both repatriation and responsibility, using juridical distance and narrative erasure to resolve the problem of return without closure.
The haunting ghosts
Hayat Boumedienne, frequently characterised as France’s most wanted woman due to her alleged role in overseeing logistics for the January 2015 attacks, occupies a similar spectral position to that of Kassim, though with instructive variations. Presumed dead following the fall of Baghouz, she subsequently reappeared and was sighted several years later, transforming from ghost to revenant: a figure returned from presumed death. Constituting 7.6 per cent of total coverage, Boumedienne is characterised through spectral vocabulary – ‘an unfindable shadow’Footnote 96 and ‘the princess of the Islamic state’Footnote 97 – that emphasises her elusiveness and the impossibility of capturing or containing her.
Where Kassim’s haunting generates language of malevolence and bloodthirst, Boumedienne’s haunting incorporates elements of fascination alongside fear. The ‘princess’ designation, while clearly condemnatory, carries connotations absent from Kassim’s framing: a degree of intrigue for her ability to evade capture. This subtle gendering reflects broader patterns in how female extremists are often rendered as exceptional figures whose agency disrupts normative expectations of feminine passivity. What Boumedienne’s case reveals most powerfully, however, is the inadequacy of gender as the primary organising category in French discourse. Boumedienne is constructed through the identical logic applied to her male counterparts: as enemy, traitor, and persistent threat. Her status as a woman does not mitigate her construction as dangerous: she remains, like Kassim, a ghost that haunts French consciousness – a figure whose uncertain status prevents closure and sustains anxiety.
The living dead
The second female category mirrors that of men: the ‘living dead’. Djamila Boutoutaou and Mélina Boughedir were each sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment – tantamount to life under Iraqi law – for terrorist offences. Media reporting on Boutoutaou addresses elements of her life, the expeditious nature of her trial, her health, and her daughter’s repatriation to France. Several headlines note that she is pleading for transfer to France to serve her sentence, describing how she ‘implores France to give her a chance’.Footnote 98 Articles relay some of her testimony, notably her willingness to be imprisoned in ‘France for life’ and her desire to ‘prove she is not dangerous’.Footnote 99 Her testimony also claims she was forcibly radicalised by her husband and coerced into obedience, even while in France. Articles recount Boutoutaou’s statements that she was ‘beaten’ and that she claims to be a ‘victim’.Footnote 100
Mélina Boughedir, the second case in this category, was also sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment in Iraq. Media reporting of her case indicates that Paris respects ‘the sovereignty of Iraqi jurisdictions’ and does not consider ‘the conditions of the trial unfair’.Footnote 101 Articles note that Boughedir and her legal team accused the French government of interference, while Iraqi authorities maintained that substantial evidence demonstrated her awareness of her husband’s activities. She is explicitly characterised as a ‘terrorist’, with French officials insisting that she should be tried in Iraq for actions committed there.Footnote 102
For men in this category, once death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, France accepted the status quo, allowing them to remain in Iraq indefinitely. The same logic applies to Boughedir and Boutoutaou, who exist in a liminal space: physically alive yet politically and socially absent. This indifference extends even to a third case, an unnamed French woman who reportedly died in the camps after France refused to repatriate her. The only confirmed death in the French dataset, her passing received little attention beyond brief reports describing it as ‘sad news’.Footnote 103
The non-return of these women illustrates the dilemma confronting France: unwilling to actively neutralise them, yet content to leave them in Iraqi prisons or camps indefinitely, despite medical conditions, prolonged detention, or claims of partial innocence. This demonstrates that indifference serves a political purpose. These women are, above all, traitors to the nation, and France remains unmoved.
Beyond gender? Death as a tool for national cohesion
The French findings reveal a model of governance in which death resolves the problem of return through restraint, ambiguity, and symbolic containment rather than spectacle or legal erasure. Media reporting renders the deaths and disappearances of ISIS-affiliated nationals administratively neutral, emotionally distant, and often unresolved, producing a form of closure that avoids both public justification and overt moralisation. Gender distinctions exist but remain secondary to a dominant logic of national betrayal and collective trauma, in which both men and women are positioned outside the moral community of citizenship. Confirmed deaths, posthumous trials, and unresolved disappearances all serve to justify the boundaries of belonging without reopening questions of responsibility or reintegration. In this context, silence and uncertainty operate as security tools, allowing the state to maintain cohesion and vigilance while foreclosing the political risks that return would entail.
Conclusion
This article analysed media representations of deceased ISIS-affiliated citizens in Australia, the UK, and France to demonstrate that the governance of ISIS affiliation does not end at death. Instead, reporting on death itself becomes a mechanism through which states continue to manage citizenship, security, and national cohesion. Despite differing institutional mechanisms, the objective is the same: to foreclose questions of responsibility, reintegration, jurisdiction, and future risk.
In Australia, where citizenship revocation powers are comparatively constrained, death is rendered visible and narratively productive. Extensive reporting on male deaths retrospectively justifies non-repatriation by framing those left behind as irredeemable threats who could not have been safely managed within the national legal order. In the UK, closure is achieved primarily through legality. Broad citizenship deprivation powers allow the state to sever responsibility prior to death, rendering many deaths narratively unnecessary once individuals are no longer juridically British. France adopts a third configuration, relying on ambiguity and juridical extension. Restrained reporting, unresolved deaths, and posthumous legal processes contain political risk and sustain national cohesion by keeping ISIS-affiliated figures permanently outside the national community.
These cases demonstrate that death does not mark the end of security. Instead, death resolves what return would complicate. It eliminates the need for trials with uncertain evidence, rehabilitation programmes with contested outcomes, and long-term risk management within domestic populations. Whether through visibility, legality, or silence, states use death to justify authority and manage the limits of belonging in the aftermath of transnational violence. Drawing on Mégie’s concept of the ‘terrorist scene’, this article has shown that death is governed through a dynamic configuration of interactions between state actors, media, and civil society.Footnote 104 Media coverage does not merely reflect governmental responses to ISIS-affiliated deaths; it also actively participates in constructing the discourses through which states frame and publicly legitimate those responses.
At the same time, the analysis clarifies that while these processes are gendered, gender does not operate simply as a moral lens. Instead, it structures how death resolves regulatory dilemmas. In Australia and the UK, gender shapes visibility and grievability: male deaths are more readily administratively settled as security successes or neutralisations, while female deaths remain narratively active, redirecting attention towards morality, family, or radicalisation pathways. In France, by contrast, gender is strategically subordinated to a unified logic of national betrayal. Men and women alike are framed through a shared grammar of exclusion, where ideological alignment with ISIS overrides distinctions of masculine threat or feminine vulnerability. This relative gender neutrality reinforces national cohesion by suppressing differential claims to protection.
Across all three contexts, grievability shapes how death functions as a governing solution. Where deaths are rendered ungrievable, closure is achieved through administrative or legal finality. Where deaths retain symbolic weight, closure requires further narrative justification. Grievability, in this sense, does not determine whose deaths matter but rather how death functions as a governing solution.
These findings also speak to wider feminist scholarship on women’s violence. While the categories identified by Sjoberg and Gentry and Seal remain valuable for understanding how female violence is rendered intelligible, the categories identified in this study suggest that contemporary counterterrorism discourse produces gendered subject positions that are not fully captured by existing typologies.Footnote 105 This demonstrates that the governance of ISIS-affiliated women in death operates through representational logics that extend beyond existing frameworks developed to explain women’s violence more generally.
By foregrounding death as an active component of security, this article shows that citizenship continues to be governed after life has ended. The narration of death plays a central role in how states reassert the boundaries of belonging at moments when those boundaries are most politically fragile. While ISIS provides a revealing context in which to examine these dynamics, the contribution extends beyond ISIS-affiliated citizens. The findings demonstrate how death can function as a site of ongoing security governance, through which contested questions of citizenship, belonging, responsibility, and exclusion continue to be negotiated. Media representations do not simply report death. They participate in the management of political community through the narration, recognition, or erasure of particular deaths.
Acknowledgement
The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their careful engagement with the manuscript and constructive comments. We are also grateful to the panellists of ‘The Missing, The Disappeared, and the Dead: Reimagining Peace and the Politics of the “Absent” in Global Politics’ at the 2024 International Studies Association Annual Convention in San Francisco, whose discussions inspired the ideas that developed into this article.
Disclosures
This research was conducted using publicly available media sources. No ethical approval was required.
Dr Se Youn Park is an international relations researcher at the University of Queensland. Her work examines how states govern political violence and insecurity through practices of inclusion, exclusion, protection, and abandonment. Her research spans security and terrorism studies, with particular interests in the gendered regulation of violent extremism, digital misogyny, and platform-facilitated extremism. She has regional expertise in Australia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.
Lou Raisonnier is a comparative politics researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa, specialising in states’ responses to terrorism. Her research examines the handling and legal shaping of the return of women involved with the Islamic State organisation in the Iraqi Syrian zone by French security and administrative institutions. She specialises in terrorism and political violence, gender, and citizenship.
Open access
