ABSTRACT
This work started off with a basic research question: What motivates women to participate in armed insurgencies? Accompanying that query was the puzzle of wide cross-national variation among rebel groups in terms of female participation. While some insurgent groups, like the EPLF, integrated women completely at different levels of the movement – at times, even including women as negotiators in internationally facilitated peace talks – other NSAGs appeared to have little or no involvement from women at all. Prior to the present study, literature on women in armed rebellion was
inadequate for making global comparisons about the conditions under which we were most likely to find women in non-state armed groups. Most academic work on women in rebel movements has been conducted at the single-case or small-N level, and studies often group a small number of movements based on ideology or regional proximity. The few cross-national studies that exist are still in a “mid-N” range, and often deal very little or not at all with theoretical explanations as to why women fight in one movement but not another. While focused, qualitative work certainly has value, the scope of these studies created an incomplete patchwork. Broad conjectures and guesses about cross-national similarities were made, but meaningful comparisons and empirical investigations were not possible. This volume has attempted to fill a gap and put forth new knowledge about
why women fight. In Chapter 2, I presented a conceptualization of “participation” in rebel movements that addresses some of the factors contributing to the omission of women from official statistics and historical records of conflict. In Chapter 3, I presented a feminist critique of mainstream theories on rebel behavior drawn from literature on political science and economics. Central to my argument is that while mainstream theories claim to be genderneutral in nature, the reality of conflict shows that there must be some differences between men and women that these theories fail to address; otherwise, we would expect to see women on the front lines of every armed insurgency. An examination of feminist theory and feminist work in security studies offers some refinements to mainstream theories, especially those focused on grievance, while at the same time forming the basis for a strong critique of others, like those focused on the individual as rational actor. These insights resulted
in the formation of what I have called a gendered theory of rebellion. The theory attempts to explain both why women choose to support violent groups and how they contribute when they decide to join in the struggle. The concepts and theories developed in Chapters 2 and 3 are then carried
forward into the data and analysis employed in Chapters 4 through 6. Chapter 4 is primarily devoted to a presentation of cross-national data detailing whether and how women contributed to 72 armed rebel groups active since 1990. These data are presented against a series of descriptive hypotheses that represent oft-repeated assertions about women in non-state armed groups. Most notable among my findings in that chapter was that women (and often girls) participate in armed conflict more frequently than many would expect. While much of the literature in mainstream international relations and political science assumes men and boys to be the default recruitment pool, in fact women have participated in more than half (about 60%) of all post-Cold War insurgencies studied here. While the bulk of this participation comes in the form of support roles – including but not limited to tasks like cooking, cleaning, espionage, recruiting, scouting, and provisioning – women have taken part in armed attacks in nearly one third of the movements I sampled, and have been leaders in more than one quarter of these groups. The analysis in Chapter 4 also indicated that many women join these violent groups voluntarily. While movements that “recruit” through kidnapping, coercion, or the use of child soldiers are more likely than not to include women, the bulk of women’s participation comes in movements where these tactics are not systematically used. Chapters 5 and 6 further explore these data, using quantitative analysis and
examples from selected cases to test hypotheses drawn from the gendered theory of rebellion introduced earlier. Among the hypotheses that are supported, economic grievances seem to play a major role in motivating women to join armed struggles. Those movements that include redistributive ideologies are about seven and a half times more likely to include women in noncombat roles than all other movements, and leftist groups are also significantly more likely to have women serving in combat and leadership roles. My expectations regarding women’s participation in movements based on religion or ethnicity also received some confirmation. I found that women were more likely to contribute to these movements as supporters, but not as combatants or leaders – a dynamic that makes sense, taking into account that these movements appeal to women in the context of (rather than in opposition to) traditional gender roles. It is also worth noting that Chapter 5 also found statistically significant differences between Islamist movements and all other ethno-religious movements, with violent Islamist movements less likely overall to include women. This may reflect such groups’ strict interpretation of Islamic law, though I also discussed a few cases where these organizations appeared to loosen their restrictions on women over time – a possible indicator that women may become more active in these insurgent groups as they mature.
