PO377 ETHNIC CONFLICT AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Week 11: Non-Traditional Agents of Political Violence

Lecture Outline

Female Combatants: Introduction Why should we care?

Pull and Push Factors Changing society? Changing (state) militaries? Changing warfare? Are non-state nationalist militaries different? Push factors for female nationalist combatants

Female Combatants In War

Female Combatants Post-War

Summary

Female Combatants: Introduction

‘In contrast to the stereotype of women as passive and peace-loving, women have throughout history supported and participated in conflicts involving their communities…. Yet the significance of their contributions remains “hidden” and therefore unanalyzed in conventional accounts’(Peterson 1998, week 8 reading list).

Female Combatants: Introduction (2) Women and girls are known to have taken

part in numerous wars in recent decades (primarily unconventional and asymmetrical wars) as soldiers or military support forces.

Women also make up increasing numbers in state militaries worldwide, though percentage usually lower than in non-state military groups and whether they are permitted in combat varies.

Female Combatants: Introduction (3)

Why should we care?

Traditional approaches conceptualise security in militarised and masculinised ways and have neglected women’s experiences and roles.Female combatants challenge our usual ideas about war, peace and gender roles.Studying female combatants can illuminate new ideas in security studies.If we do not grapple with the reality of women’s violence as well as men’s, our peacemaking efforts will be less successful.

Sri Lanka: two young LTTE women (2002)

Northern Ireland: Republican political murals depicting women

Northern Ireland: Republican political murals depicting women

Northern Ireland: Republican political murals depicting women

Pull and Push Factors

CHANGING SOCIETY? (push) Are female soldiers just a reflection of wider

societal changes to gender roles; part of women’s moves into traditionally male occupations? Are female soldiers the ultimate symbol of gender equality?

May not be this simple for non-state military groups or for state militaries in a time of war.

Doesn’t account for why women are more involved as combatants in non/anti-state militaries than in state militaries and pro-state paramilitaries.

Pull and Push Factors (2)

CHANGING (STATE) MILITARIES? (pull)

Increasing numbers of women in Western state militaries in last few decades largely to do with broader professionalisation of these militaries – does this apply to state militaries in developing countries?

Strategic need for enough peacetime forces with waning male enlistment and ending of conscription.

Pull and Push Factors (3)

CHANGING WARFARE? (pull and push)

Patterns of warfare changed in second half of 20th century: affects women’s and children’s roles (think about the ‘new wars’ debate here).

Contemporary conflicts ‘privatize violence and engage an array of state and non-state actors. As more and more civilians are drawn into conflicts, the conventional separation of male belligerents and inhabitants no longer prevails.’ Distinction between combatant (men) and civilian (women and children) no longer as clear (Turshen 1998).

Pull and Push Factors (4)

ARE NON-STATE NATIONALIST MILITARIES DIFFERENT? (pull)Non-state militaries also have serious strategic need.Ideological need: women in a militant organisation can symbolically legitimise a nationalist movement as a mass social movement (Yuval-Davis 1997). Women not easily incorporated. In national liberation armies ‘a strong common ideological stance might help to transcend some of these tensions, especially where women’s emancipation is seen to symbolize the emancipation of the people as a whole’ (Yuval-Davis 1997, p. 101).But liberation armies differ in how they incorporate women and in their internal gender roles and relations.

Pull and Push Factors (5)

PUSH FACTORS FOR FEMALE NATIONALIST COMBATANTS

Shouldn’t underestimate nationalist commitment and political concerns as motivations for women to enlist but does seem to be some truth in idea that women are more likely to participate when their families or homes are threatened.

Perceptions about societal insecurity of their ethno-national group; their individual insecurity; and, for some, gender-specific insecurities interrelate in complex and varying ways (see Alison 2004).

Pull and Push Factors (6)

LTTE: nationalist commitment; death of a loved one and/or other experiences/perceptions of suffering and oppression at hands of the state (incl. experiences of displacement); educational disruption and restrictions; poverty; sexual violence against women; ideas of women’s emancipation.

IRA: nationalist commitment; experiences/perceptions of discrimination and injustice (esp. harassment by security forces and/or anti-Catholic employment discrimination); loved ones killed, injured or imprisoned; impact of civil rights movement; impact of prison protests and hunger strikes; growing up in strongly republican families.

Loyalists: a great many (not all) loyalist paramilitary women were introduced through male family members but many also stress they believed they were defending their families and wider community.

(On the LTTE in Sri Lanka and Republican and Loyalist combatant women in Northern Ireland see Alison 2009 and 2004).

Female Combatants In War

Women’s and girls’ experiences as soldiers varies significantly between conflicts and militaries, but there are some recurring themes and ambiguities: Women are frequently at significant risk of sexual

violence from their male comrades (even more so than from the ‘enemy’).

Motherhood for female combatants is a complex and politicised issue. Different militaries respond to issues of sex and motherhood differently.

Women have to work harder than men to ‘prove’ themselves worthy soldiers.

Militaries often utilise conservative societal expectations about gender roles to their tactical advantage in terms of roles women undertake.

Women may be (even?) more marginalised/ excluded in political representation and peace negotiation than they are as combatants.

On the other hand military experience often opens up new spaces and opportunities for women, new skills and experiences previously barred to them.

Female Combatants Post-War

‘Like male combatants, female combatants in nationalist conflicts view themselves as fighting to protect the political, cultural, economic and military security of their nation, community or family: that is, societal security at varying social levels. However, despite women’s frequent involvement in nationalist conflict as combatants, there is a recurring global pattern of their postwar remarginalization and return to traditional roles’ (Alison 2004, p. 458).

Female Combatants Post-War (2) In some societies, having been guerrilla fighters has

earned women social and political authority. However a reversal of women’s rights and opportunities is more common (Yuval-Davis 1997 pp. 103-105).

Women combatants may be perceived as a necessary but temporary aberration in a time of national crisis and need, not as signifying a fundamental societal change.

They may even ‘figure as a threat to the nation’s and the state’s ideological security and cohesion and the existing political culture, through their destabilization of gender roles’ (Alison 2004, p. 458).

Female Combatants Post-War (3) Kandiyoti (1991): there is a ‘purely instrumental

agenda of nationalist policies that mobilise women when they are needed in the labour force or even at the front, only to return them to domesticity or to subordinate roles in the public sphere when the national emergency is over’. (Week 8 reading list.)

Pettman (1996, pp. 61-62): ‘there is now considerable evidence that those causes that are marginalised in the struggle are likely to be marginalised in its victories, and especially in the consolidation and institutionalisation of victory in the state’. (Week 8 reading list.)

Female Combatants Post-War (4)

‘As long as the struggle of the powerless is to gain power rather than to transform power relations within the society, so-called “national liberation” has often just brought further oppression to women and other disadvantaged groupings within the new social order. While armed struggle might sometimes be the only way open to fight against oppression and occupation, the ways this struggle is organized, its targets and social organization, are crucial’(Yuval-Davis 1997, p. 113).

Summary

Women’s participation in militaries and wars as combatants has increased in recent decades, especially in unconventional wars and non-state militaries.

Notion that this is just due to wider changes in women’s position in society and professionalisation of state militaries doesn’t necessarily account for non-state militaries or state militaries in wartime.

Changing patterns of warfare and blurring of combatant-civilian/war front-home front boundaries explains more, as does nature of non-state nationalist militaries.

Participation as nationalist combatants is no guarantee of women achieving greater rights post-war (often a regression).