ABSTRACT
The previous chapter introduced data on women’s participation in 72 armed rebel groups active between 1990 and 2008. These data showed that women have been active participants in over half of all insurgencies active since the end of the Cold War, with women playing support roles in 58.3% of these movements and combat roles (i.e. direct engagement in armed attacks) in 31.9% of these movements. In this chapter, I return to the gendered theory of rebellion developed in
Chapter 3 to identify and test hypotheses on why women fight. While the previous chapter discussed overall patterns of participation, the focus in this chapter is on the relationship between grievance, private goods, and participation, including an assessment of the relationship between ideology and women’s participation in rank-and-file (i.e. non-leadership) roles. As mentioned in Chapter 4, women are far more often represented in rank-and-file roles than they are in leadership positions. With only one exception, every movement where women were active as combatants also featured women in noncombat roles, reinforcing the idea that positions engaged in armed combat are often elite roles that women must work or advance in order to attain. Using descriptive statistics, quantitative models, and an exploration of selected cases, this chapter shows that the theory of rebellion advanced earlier has some explanatory power, particularly with regard to economic and ethnoreligious grievances as motivating factors that drive women to take up arms. At the same time, these findings cast doubt on the salience of other motivating factors such as political grievance (as it is traditionally defined) and the potential for personal gain. A commentary on the difference between Islamist and non-Islamist ethno-religious groups also forms an important part of the chapter, as the data indicate that women play distinct roles in these organizations.
