ABSTRACT
One of the shortcomings of literature exploring women’s roles in armed rebel groups has been the lack of cross-national work. To date, the few studies on the subject that are international in nature (as opposed to regional, comparative works) analyze relatively few groups and often draw cases from a long time horizon – sometimes covering post-Cold War, Cold War, and even pre-World War II era movements together, without much regard to differences in historical context.1 These studies also tend to focus on just positive cases, looking only at where women are instead of where they are not; yet examining those movements where women are absent (or appear to be absent in some roles) can also yield interesting insights. Another shortcoming of prior work in this area is that much of it has been
atheoretical in nature, with some authors hesitant to advance a theoretical framework for understanding women’s participation, and others proposing one-dimensional explanations. In their volume, Cragin and Daly (2009) very briefly discuss grievance as a motivator for women, but they more or less accept as a given that women are motivated by grievance, and they offer no distinction between economic, political, or other motivations. Cunningham (2003) only distinguishes between leftist and non-leftist insurgencies. She concludes that leftist movements are probably more successful at attracting women, but also acknowledges that women are becoming more active in right-wing or Islamist movements over time. Gonzalez-Perez (2006, 2008) proposes to explain women’s participation by distinguishing only between movements with a “domestic” agenda and those with an “international” agenda. These concepts, however, are very broadly defined. Her conceptualization of “international” movements includes Marxist, ethno-national, and Islamist or other religious movements, without much attempt to distinguish among the impact of these different ideologies on women. There is also arguably some conceptual stretching of how this framework is applied. For example, while she defines “international” movements to include those opposing US influence and capitalist expansion, she classifies the FMLN and the Sandinistas of Nicaragua (among others) as “domestic” movements, despite the fact that these organizations advanced significant discourse surrounding US investment and manipulation in their countries (Gonzalez-Perez 2006, 2008). Finally,
Eager openly states that her volume does not intend to “posit a general theory of why women engage in political violence” (Eager 2008, 1). The aim of these empirical chapters is to build upon previous scholarship
in two ways: first, this chapter presents data on women’s involvement in over 70 rebel movements worldwide that have been active since 1990 – data on a scale and geographic scope previously unavailable in this time period. Chapter 6 then applies these data directly to the theoretical framework developed in Chapter 3. The data presented here offer some preliminary insights into the impact or influence of differing ideologies on women.More importantly, though, they presents a clearer picture of where and how women are contributing to insurgencies than we have had to date. These data serve to both reinforce and challenge some conventional
wisdom on women and conflict, presented here in the form of several descriptive hypotheses. Among the relevant findings, the data show that women are active participants in well over half of the world’s rebel groups – casting doubt on conventional stereotypes that women make peace, not war. Additionally, while women tend to be more active in supporting or noncombat roles, this research shows that women are also taking part in armed attacks in nearly one third of the rebel movements examined herein, and that they hold leadership roles in over one quarter of these groups. While some of the historical trends noted in earlier chapters appear still to hold true in the modern era – with women taking on many tasks that mirror their peacetime gender roles – there is also some indication of changes and developments where women are becoming more powerful and strategically important.
