ABSTRACT
Academic and policy literature has established that many militia groups routinely target civilians with deadly violence within and outside civil wars. Comparatively less attention and theorizing have been devoted to the rarer phenomenon of militia forces that exercise restraint on the widespread and deliberate use of lethal violence toward civilians. Based on secondary sources triangulated with original evidence gathered through fieldwork research, this chapter explores militia restraint through the case study of the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), which is an all-female, female-led brigade among Kurdish-led militia forces in northeast Syria. Drawing on organizational and socialization studies, and theoretical insights from scholarship on the restraint of combatant violence, we argue that these Kurdish militias function as socializing institutions through which ideology-driven norms and mechanisms to control violence produce an internalized praxis of restraint that strategically facilitates the consolidation of political power for the dominant sociopolitical movement in Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria. We find that restraint is not exercised exclusively by the YPJ; for the most part, their male counterparts in other Kurdish-led, multiethnic militias practiced it too. This suggests that the restraint shown by the YPJ when it comes to lethal violence against civilians has more to do with the interplay of specific political, ideological, and strategic factors than with any intrinsic quality as women.
