International Theory (2019), 11, 139–159 doi:10.1017/S1752971919000034 ARTICLE Militarized masculinities beyond methodological nationalism: charting the multiple masculinities of an Indonesian jihadi David Duriesmith 1 * and Noor Huda Ismail 2,3 1 School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4072, Australia, 2 Monash Centre for Gender, Peace and Security, School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts Monash University, Clayton 3800, Australia and 3 Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore *Corresponding author. Email: davidduriesmith@gmail.com (Received 15 January 2018; revised 15 January 2019; accepted 19 February 2019) Abstract Studies of masculinity and armed conflict have struggled to capture the complex interaction between globalized militarized masculinities and local gender formations. Particularly in conflicts characterized by a high degree of combatant mobility (in the form of foreign fighters, massed displacement, or significant diaspora involvement) locating the relevant gender dynamics can prove to be a difficult step in understanding the character of armed groups. Based on fieldwork with Indonesian former foreign fighters, we make the case that feminist international relations have tended to unreflectively default to the nation when locating gender hierarchies. Exploring the multiple articulations of masculinity present in former fighters’ lives, we suggest that efforts must be made to resist methodological nationalism in understanding the relationship between gender hierarchies and armed conflict. Charting how foreign fighters traverse local constructions of gender, national gender hierarchies, and transnational social structures to participate in the conflict, we argue that adopting a conscious consideration of scale in our research method is needed to move beyond methodological nationalism. Keywords: militarized masculinities; feminist international relations; methodological nationalism; Indonesia; jihad; Jemaah Islamiyah This paper explores the complex overlapping hierarchies of gender which are present in contemporary conflict. 1 We propose that feminist international relations © Cambridge University Press 2019. 1 We would like to thank the editors at International Theory and the two anonymous reviewers to read earlier versions of this paper for us. Their comments were tremendously valuable and improved our paper considerably. Additionally, we would like to express our appreciation to our colleagues at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security, the School of Social & Political Science at the University of Melbourne, and the School of Political Science & International Studies at the University of Queensland who all assisted in workshopping earlier versions of the paper. of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971919000034 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 14.202.63.40, on 29 Apr 2019 at 23:39:33, subject to the Cambridge Core terms