Ahmad Ridwan
In Indonesia's post-terrorism policy landscape, women and children from former terrorist families remain overlooked by both the state and society. Although not directly involved in acts of violence, they bear the affective and structural legacies of stigma, social surveillance, and exclusion. This study explores how women and children in such families experience, interpret, and navigate post-terrorism realities in gendered ways. Between January 2024 and May 2025, we conducted in-depth interviews with six wives and four adolescent daughters of former terrorism convicts, complemented by participant observation in Paciran, Lamongan, East Java. The data were analyzed through an intersectional feminist–oriented thematic analysis. Findings reveal that their lived experiences are not solely characterized by suffering, but also by hidden forms of agency, such as care work, strategic silence, and identity negotiation in hostile social spaces. These strategies highlight how stigma operates as both exclusion and control, while simultaneously generating subtle forms of resistance. This article argues for a feminist ethics of recovery that recognizes women and children not merely as passive victims but as political actors whose everyday negotiations contribute to resilience and social transformation. In doing so, it contributes to feminist security studies and policy debates on post-terrorism reintegration by foregrounding the voices of groups often rendered invisible in dominant security discourses. © 2026 Elsevier Ltd.
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Negeri Surabaya, Indonesia
