Gendered youth transitions in local jihad in Indonesia: negotiating agency in arranged marriage

In accounts of local Islamist jihad, little attention has been directed to how young women exercise agency when they face arranged marriages with jihadi fighters. They undergo a different kind of life transition, one that has rarely been examined in youth studies. This paper reports on a study of how young female Muslims in arranged marriages with mujahidin men navigated their transitions to adulthood in Eastern Indonesia. The study employed an ethnographic approach, including live-in observation and interviews. The data was analysed using a biographical narrative approach. We found that some young local women were married off to previously unknown mujahidin men. As the Muslim-Christian conflict raged around them, they navigated their roles of wife and mother while embedded in a jihadi network justified by Islamist ideology. Later, following the arrest of their husbands, they gained some agency and asserted a more independent adulthood by actively shaping their own life trajectories. The analysis extends our broader knowledge of (female) youth transitions in civil conflict situations in the Global South.