Keywords: oriental studies, African studies, gender studies, gender inequality, gender balance, social emancipation, mixed marriages, violence, domestic violence, terrorism, conflict, family conflict, women's rights

Round table " Terrorism and violence in the East and Africa. Gender Aspects", held at the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences in October 2015, continued the already established tradition of organizing meetings on gender issues that have been successfully held in recent years at the academic venues of the Institute of Africa and the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.¹

The round table organizers ' research interests are focused on issues related to the situation of society and individuals in a state of conflict (and in the broadest sense of the word). Behind these problems are dynamic social transformations, powerful social reconstructions, which could not but affect the culture of gender relations.

This concerns, first of all, the phenomenon of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in terms of its gender interests and needs. Numerous international and national studies, publications of political scientists, historians, cultural scientists and psychologists, journalistic research, and materials from social networks that actively discuss this issue in a wide range - from propaganda about the involvement of women in the jihadist movement to graphic illustrations of the nightmares of gender-based terror and violence in the "Islamic State" - show how relevant this issue has become worldwide.

In early 2015, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a British independent research center, published a report directly related to the topic of the round table. According to the report, more than half a thousand women-young, old, pregnant, wives and girls, independently and with their husbands - supporters of jihadists - went to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State group.

What is it that attracts these women who risk their freedom and even their lives to venture into the unknown? And into the unknown? The desire of many of them was formed under the influence of images and texts distributed in social networks, designed to demonstrate the alleged struggle of "infidels" against Muslims around ^the world2.

However, the discussion on this topic would be incomplete if the speakers did not address the question of who are these women? Is there a common social outline of European, Eurasian, Asian fans and followers of the idea of a new world? What are the motivations that make the women of the "free world", as well as our compatriots, renounce everything and move to the territories controlled by the jihadist group?

N. V. Grishina, Senior Researcher of the Center for Sociological and Political Studies of the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences, addressed these issues in her report. She noted that over the past few decades, women have become increasingly involved in terrorist activities, and this phenomenon is observed not only in the Middle East, in some regions of Africa, but also in the southern regions of Russia.

In this regard, the question of preferences in choosing a marriage partner by young Russian and European citizens of matrimonial age is also interesting. ^{N. K. Murnova, chief specialist of the Moscow House of the Compatriot (Moscow City Government), said this in her speech, referring to the testimonies of} 3 eyewitnesses.

This problem is one of the most difficult both for collecting information and for its moral development.-

ethical reflection. Since there are no strictly fixed criteria for evaluating the motivations of such actions, there are no statistics on this matter. This can be explained, among other things, by the deliberately low effect of attempts to transfer the category of intimate-the way of thinking, ideas, experience of a person, the scale of his values - from the world of individuality to the sphere of statistics.

International practical circles of researchers dealing with this group of issues have formed an idea of a more or less stable pattern of motives that guide those who have decided to link their fate with the "Islamic State" and its army. Among these motives are dissatisfaction and disappointment in life, the desire to do something in the name of their ideas. At the same time, there are also motives that are somehow connected with the expression of love, personal affection, and the simple desire to marry a real "warrior of Islam". There is a category of women who can make such a move for opportunistic reasons or due to personal drama.

Of course, those gathered at the round table noted, such a scheme is very conditional. However, the materials available to researchers allow us to state that the various motives that encourage women to take such a step sometimes poorly correlate with the stereotypes that have become established in the everyday consciousness of Europeans or our compatriots.

Russia has accumulated considerable experience in countering terrorism in difficult conditions of multiculturalism and multiconfessionalism, including the prevention of radical extremism.⁴ However, due to the limited amount of sociological information about the early stages of this process in our country, it is not easy to refute this scheme, and it also has some common sense, not devoid of ideological overtones.

* * *

More than half of all armed conflicts in the world occur on the Black Continent, which is often referred to as the "continent of conflicts" or "territory of conflicts"⁵. Having a common genesis, conflicts here are caused by the action of various factors and manifest themselves in different ways. Most often ,this is a struggle for the possession of power, for control over a certain territory, the population living there, and resources.

In Africa, peace and war go side by side. To date, there are about 16 armed conflicts on the continent, in the zone of which there are from a quarter to a third of the population of Tropical Africa. The consequences of these conflicts were incalculable human losses, economic destruction, mass poverty, hunger, devastation, and a catastrophic increase in the number of refugees. By the end of the 20th century, about 8 million people had died in civil conflicts, at least 6 million had become refugees, and up to 30 million had been forced migrants. ⁶ Countries affected by armed conflicts were left behind in their development for 20 years or more.⁷

Despite the proclamation of the UN General Assembly Resolution 3318 (XXIX) back in 1974, According to the Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Emergencies and Armed Conflicts, women and children on this continent, being the most vulnerable part of the population, continue to be subjected to attacks and various kinds of reprisals, cruel and inhuman treatment, both during military operations and in the occupied territories. Thus, according to UNICEF, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other international humanitarian organizations, during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, O. B. Gromova, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences, emphasized in her report that almost all women and children in this country were subjected to violence to one degree or another - a quarter of a million women were raped, half of those aged 25 to 50 were left widows8. Later, in 2006, hundreds of children were killed every day in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) by rebel forces fighting against the current Government.

Foreign citizens, including Russian women who live permanently with their African husbands in Rwanda and other African countries, have not escaped the horrors of such conflicts. Our compatriot T. V. Ayo - Pimanova from Cote d'Ivoire and researchers N. V. Sukhov (Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences) and N. L. Krylova (Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences), who spoke in this block of problems, noted that more than

what is the half-century history of Russian women who moved to the countries of the African continent for permanent residence, alas! - it is full of such stories, dramatic conflicts and tragic cases related to the real and legal vulnerability and vulnerability of the woman and her children, both at the time of military operations and during the period of aggravation of the internal political situation in the country of permanent residence. This was the case, for example, in Algeria in the autumn of 1993, when during the aggravation of the internal conflict with fundamentalists, several French, Germans, Italians, Russian servicemen, as well as Russian women - wives of Algerian citizens who were permanently residing in ANDRES-were killed as a result of terrorist acts directed against foreign citizens.⁹

International organizations do not stand aside from solving these problems. E. V. Kiseleva and E. N. Mamaeva from RUDN University reported in their general report on the many components of the United Nations system, which makes great efforts to protect women in times of armed conflict, to ensure that gender factors are taken into account in activities aimed at restoring social and economic life in post-conflict countries. The report of O. S. Kulkova, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was devoted to the EU's efforts to protect the rights and unleash the creative potential of African women in conflict situations and post-conflict reconstruction in the 2000s.

The fact that violence can be not only physical in nature, said in her report "Afrocentric feminism: the concept of intellectual violence" graduate student of Yaroslavl State University N. E. Khokholkova.

In speeches analyzing the corpus of literary works by francophone and English-speaking writers of North and Tropical Africa, Doctor of Philology, Professor S. V. Prozhogina (Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences), Associate Professor of the Moscow State Law School N. Y. Ilina, Doctor of Philology N. S. Naidenova (RUDN University) gave the most striking examples of artistic evidence, showing how a woman tries to preserve her dignity, her "valor and honor", bequeathed by her ancestors, as she defends her world from attempts to destroy its integrity, from its depersonalization. How it tries, according to Professor S. V. Prozhogina, to preserve its roots, not to waste its self-essence in the processes of global migration that have become inevitable, as well as in attempts to integrate itself into other worlds and societies.

* * *

The modern family is most often considered by cultural scientists, sociologists, and legal scholars as a private sphere of human life. In everyday consciousness, the concept of "family" is also habitually associated with a certain sphere closed from prying eyes, where a person is protected from the pressure and stress of the outside world. Indeed, it is generally accepted that the family, first of all, is an area in the space of human relationships, where positive processes of care and guardianship can develop, in which people are united by deep feelings of love and affection, the desire for procreation. However, the family can also be a social institution, where the rights of its members are violated, violence is manifested against the weak - women and children. Therefore, choosing for a comprehensive understanding of the topic of conflict as a system of various oppositional states and relations - individual, social, historical, cultural, racial, ethnic, confessional, political, psychological and others - the participants of the round table raised another topic - the last in a row, but by no means the last in its significance - gender-based violence as a whole. It is one of the most pressing issues around the world, affecting almost all aspects of women's lives.

It is "domestic violence", being a kind of discrimination against the fair sex and at the same time one of the most common phenomena in the chain of violations of women's rights and interests, that is defined worldwide as the most serious mass social disease, manifested in various actions and forms, often dictated by the peculiarities and originality of the historical and cultural traditions of the studied regions of the world. Numerous studies in this area, under the direction of-

according to I. G. Rybalkina, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences, it is increasingly suggested that the "cradle of education" can, under certain conditions, turn into a "cradle of violence", which has many incarnations: physical and sexual aggression against children; vulnerability to violence of infirm and elderly family members, etc. However, the overwhelming majority of victims of domestic violence are women-wives, girlfriends, cohabitants, mothers, sisters, daughters, housekeepers, etc. ¹⁰

Despite the high latency of this type of violence, the problem itself seems to have existed since the advent of the institution of marriage itself. Today, " domestic violence "is a very common phenomenon around the world, which has become a truly" epidemic of the XXI century " and requires the development of a strategy to eliminate it.

Finally, the distinction between public and private, which underlies some legal systems of the regions studied, is often the main obstacle to the observance of women's rights in the human rights system, Professor S. V. Polenina, Honored Lawyer of the Russian Federation, and L. Ya.Prokopenko, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences, emphasized in their reports.

At the same time, it is precisely the protection of women's rights and interests that is one of the most important areas of the institute of social and legal protection. M. G. Kotovskaya, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chief Researcher of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Chairman of the Commission on Nationalities and Migration Affairs of the Public Chamber of Moscow and member of the Commission on Education under the Council on Interethnic Relations under the President of the Russian Federation, spoke about this on the example of a complex picture of migration processes in Russia.

* * *

Summing up the results of the round table " Terrorism and violence in the East and Africa. Gender aspects", its organizers emphasized the relevance and timeliness of such a meeting, since social processes in these regions have a unique "demonstration effect" of possible scenarios of social development for other regions that may find themselves in similar extreme situations.

All 35 experts participating in the conversation-Africanists, Orientalists, historians, ethnologists, lawyers and cultural scientists, teachers and public figures-continue to search for answers to the questions raised by the round table.

¹ For more information, see: Krylova N. L. Gendernye issledovanyya utchenikh... / / Asia and Africa Today, 2015, No. 4. pp. 71-75. (Krylova N. L. Gendernye issledovanyya utchenikh ... / / Azia i Afrika segodnya. N 4) (in Russian)

² Report: Hundreds of women leave Europe to join IS jihadists- 2015 - 01 - 29bbs.co.uk

³ From poverty and dislike. Why do our compatriots seek to join ISIS? Interview with Rimma Rezaeva. 29.06.2015 12:17 Аркадий Бейненсон - http://russkoepole.de/ru/rubriki/tochka-zreniya/2557-ot-bednosti-i-nelyubvi-pochemu-nashi-s ootechestvenniki-stremyatsya-v-igil.html

^{Kosachev K. L.} 4 The Russian Federation is ready to offer its experience in countering terrorism. 07.01.2015 - http://dailynewslight.ru/?u=07012015787

⁵ For more information, see: Conflicts in Africa: causes, genesis and problems of settlement (ethnopolitical and social aspects). Moscow, 2013 (Konflikty v Afrike: prichiny, genezis i problemy uregulirovaniya...) (in Russian); Urnov A. Yu. Afrika i UN na izde pervoe pervogo detiya XXI veka [Africa and the UN at the end of the first Decade of the XXI century]. Moscow, 2011 (Urnov A. Yu. Afrika i OON na iskhode pervogo...) (in Russian); Kosukhin N. D. Afrika: searching for an update. Dynamics of Political Changes in the late XX-early XXI centuries, Moscow, 2007 (Kosukhin N. D. Afrika: Poiski obnovleniya...) (in Russian); Ethnopolitical conflict: ways of transformation, Moscow, 2007 (Etnopoliticheskiy konflikt: puti transformatsii...) (in Russian); Modern Africa. Metamorphoses of Political power, Moscow, 2009 (Sovremennaya Afrika. Metamorfozy transformatsii...) (in Russian); Vasiliev A.M. Afrika-padcheritsa globalizatsii...), Moscow, 2003 (Vasiliev A.M. Afrika - padcheritsa globalizatsii...) (in Russian); Tatarintsev V. M. Afrika v sovremennom mire, Moscow, 2003 (Tatarintsev V. V.M. Afrika v sovremennom mire...) (in Russian); What women do in wartime. Gender and conflict in Africa. L.-N.Y., 1998; Children and war. Moscow, 1995, etc.

⁶ For more information, see: Modern Africa. Metamorphoses of political power ... p. 227; Conflicts in Africa: causes, genesis and problems of settlement... p. 24.

⁷ African Journal on Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution. Addis Ababa. Vol. 1, N 1, January-April 1997. P. 4; Imolighe T.A. Conflict in Africa: Roles of OAU, Subregional Organization in Capasity Building for Crisis Management in Africa. Lagos, 1998. P. 70.

⁸ Refugee children. Recommendations for providing protection and assistance. Geneva, UNHCR, 1994; State of the World's Children, 2000. New York, UNICEF, 2000, et al.

⁹ For more details, see: Information of the Russian Embassy in ANDR" On a terrorist act against Russian military specialists working in Algeria " dated October 27, 1993; Information of the Consulate General of the Russian Federation in Annaba (ANDR) "On the internal political situation in the Annabinsk consular district and measures to ensure the security of citizens of the Russian Federation and the CIS" dated October 20 November 1993; Information of the Consulate General of the Russian Federation in Annaba (Algeria) "On the development of the situation in the East of the ANDR and measures to ensure the safety of Russian citizens", dated December 18, 1993.

¹⁰ См.: Freedom from Violence: Women's Strategies from Around the World. Wash., 1992.

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