Female Fighters

Between 1942 and 1945, thousands of women joined the National Liberation Army (NLA) to fight against the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia. Female fighters ultimately made up as much as 15 percent of the Partisan fighting forces, with many serving in frontline combat positions (Batinic 2015, 131–132; Jancar 1981). Despite the scope and scale of their eventual participation in the group, women were largely absent from the Partisan combat forces at the beginning of the conflict. While a few women served in the NLA at the insurgency’s outset, they were deployed almost exclusively in support roles (e.g., nursing, logistics, administration, etc.) and were generally prevented from directly participating in combat. By early 1942 this practice changed, and the NLA began training and arming female members and allowed some female recruits to serve in combat positions (Batinic 2015, 127–129). A series of recruitment campaigns undertaken by the NLA later that year further expanded the number of women in its ranks and contributed to the relatively high proportion of female fighters that participated in the resistance movement throughout the remainder of the conflict (130).

To explain the observed change in the NLA leadership’s position on the role of women in the group’s fighting force, previous studies have pointed to a combination of ideological and strategic factors. First, the NLA was closely connected to and largely traced it origins to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, an organization with a long history of advancing women’s rights and encouraging women’s political activism (Jancar 1981). As such, the incorporation of women into the Partisan forces was largely consistent with the prevailing Marxist ideology of the organization. In addition, some scholars contend that Partisan leaders sought to use the presence of female combatants to stress the gender egalitarian values of the movement and thus showcase their commitment to Marxist ideology to powerful Communist allies such the Soviet Union (Batinic 2015, 128–129; Jancar 1981, 150). These factors help explain the willingness of Tito and other NLA leaders to recruit female combatants. However, the acute resource demands the group experienced during winter of 1941–1942 arguably provide a more compelling explanation for the timing of the decision and the scope of the recruitment effort (Batinic 2015, 129–130). During this window of time, Partisan forces suffered heavy losses as they simultaneously attempted to repel multiple German offensives and engaged in frequent clashes with Chetnik forces. Manpower shortages resulting from these events left the Partisan forces weakened and placed the NLA’s long-term survival in jeopardy. The leadership’s decision to recruit women and deploy substantial numbers of these recruits in combat therefore corresponds to a period of acute resource constraints.

As I argue in this chapter, far from simply explaining the timing and scope of women’s participation in this specific case, the joint roles of ideology and resource constraints in shaping rebel leaders’ decision to mobilize women in war are broadly generalizable to a large number of civil conflicts. Using insights from existing “demand-side” models of rebel recruitment, I link female recruitment to the combination of the severity of the resource constraints imposed on the group as well as to leaders’ perceptions of the relative costs associated with opening recruitment opportunities to women as a means of addressing those constraints. More specifically, I argue that sharp increases in resource demands—such as those that occur during periods of intense fighting or following substantial troop losses—incentivize rebel leaders to recruit female fighters as a strategy of preserving or expanding the rebellion. However, the gender beliefs and attitudes of a group’s leadership as well as those of the constituencies on which the group relies for support determine the costs the leadership expects to incur from recruiting women and deploying them on the battlefield. The political ideology embraced by a rebel group—which I contend conveys important information about those expected costs—conditions the influence of resource demands on leaders’ decisions to employ female combatants. Consequently, despite their initial reluctance, secular rebel groups have become increasingly willing to utilize female combatants as war-related human resource constraints intensify. By contrast, armed groups that embrace ideologies oriented toward reinforcing or reaffirming traditional social hierarchies, which are comparatively more sensitive to the costs associated with recruiting female combatants, remain unlikely to recruit women for war even as sharply rising resource demands potentially jeopardize the movement’s ability to achieve its goals.

The Political Economy of Rebel Recruitment

The likelihood that a rebel movement survives and ultimately achieves its political and military objectives heavily depends on its ability to mobilize human and material resources (e.g., Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan 2009; Hultquist 2013). As such, resource mobilization, particularly the ability to recruit and retain collaborators and combatants, represents one of the central tasks of any successful rebel organization (Gates 2002; Leites and Wolf 1970, 32–34). To achieve this objective, rebels select from among a variety of recruitment strategies. Rebel leaders determine a set of incentives to offer to potential recruits, which typically includes some combination of coercive threats and promises of material (or nonmaterial) benefits. They likewise select the geographic areas in which they choose to recruit, the populations they intend to target for recruitment, and the types of recruits they are willing to accept.

In order to explain the recruitment strategies that rebels adopt—as well as the relative success of these strategies—previous studies have often relied on insights from industrial organization theory and labor economics (e.g., Gates 2002, 2017; Humphreys and Weinstein 2008; Weinstein 2007). While the specific theoretical models employed by these studies vary, most adopt some form of basic supply-demand framework. According to such approaches, rebel recruitment is a function of both the supply of individuals available to fight for the rebel group and the rebel leadership’s demand for these potential recruits. Furthermore, this framework implies that the ratio of the supply of potential recruits to the group’s demand for them determines the specific recruitment tactics it adopts. For example, scholars have previously employed this framework to explain the prevalence of child soldiers in armed groups (Achvarina 2010; Achvarina and Reich 2006; Andvig and Gates 2010; Beber and Blattman 2013). According to these studies, factors that increase the supply of children available for recruitment, such as rebel access to refugee camps and the number of displaced and orphaned children among the local population, increase the likelihood that rebels will recruit children for combat. Additionally, rising demand for child soldiers, which is often related to an insufficient supply of adult recruits, increases the prevalence of child soldiers. In a similar manner, scholars have also linked the balance of persuasion and coercion rebel movements employ to mobilize support and acquire recruits with variations in the intensity of the human resource demands they face (Eck 2014; Gates 2002; Leites and Wolfe 1970). Particularly, these studies suggest that rebels increasingly replace voluntary appeals for support with more coercive tactics as the demand for new recruits outstrips their ready supply.

Scholars have also recently begun employing aspects of this framework to better understand women’s mobilization for armed conflict. In the context of female recruitment, supply represents the available population of women who would willingly respond to the group’s offer of membership, while demand reflects the rebel leadership’s willingness or desire to create opportunities for women to participate in the armed movement as combatants. Broadly speaking, most research investigating the conditions that encourage women to join an armed group directly or indirectly addresses the supply-side factors associated with female recruitment. Such studies have, for example, found that women’s exposure to state-sponsored violence (especially sexual violence) and their subsequent desire for security or revenge (Bloom 2011; Speckhard 2008; Viterna 2013); the role of prevailing gender norms and women’s prewar participation in social, economic, and political processes (Reif 1986; Thomas and Wood 2018); women’s previous involvement in activist networks (Eggert 2018, 11; Kampwirth 2001; Mason 1992; Viterna 2006); and the appeal of revolutionary or gender-inclusive political ideologies (Kampwirth 2001; Molyneux 1985) serve as important supply-side factors explaining women’s participation in armed groups.

These analyses have produced valuable insights about the dynamics of female recruitment. However, as Thomas and Bond (2015, 488–489) contend, existing scholarship on female fighters has disproportionally focused on supply-side factors and has often ignored or downplayed the central role that demand-side factors play in determining the presence of women’s participation in rebel and terrorist organizations. In their effort to examine the role of demand-side factors, Thomas and Bond therefore focus on understanding organizational preferences regarding gender diversity in the ranks and seek to identify the group-level characteristics that encourage or discourage the recruitment of women and their deployment in combat. Ultimately, they conclude that the perceived tactical advantages of using female combatants (e.g., in terror attacks), whether the group embraces a gender-inclusive ideology, and the leadership’s assessment of the potential threat female recruits pose to group cohesion and public support influence the group’s demand for female combatants. Moreover, they assert that such demand-side factors have more explanatory power than many common supply-side factors.

Following these insights, my theory privileges the role of demand-side factors in explaining the mobilization of women for war. I focus primarily on demand-side factors for two specific reasons. First, as I discussed in the introductory chapter, anecdotal evidence suggests that even in societies characterized by strict gender-based divisions of labor and the presence of rigid gender norms, a subset of the female population is willing to take up arms on behalf of an armed movement provided they are given the opportunity. This appears to be the case even for groups whose beliefs contradict liberal notions of women’s rights and gender equality. For instance, substantial numbers of women have volunteered to fight on behalf of radical Islamist groups such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Shabaab, the Tehrik-i-Taliban, and (recently) ISIS. Substantial numbers of women have also fought on behalf of a wide variety of other violent movements that made no explicit appeals to gender equality or women’s rights, including the PIRA in Northern Ireland, the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG), Chechen insurgents in Russia, and the National Resistance Army (NRA) in Uganda. That women were willing to mobilize in support of these groups, and in some cases risk their lives in combat, implies that locating a supply of potential female recruits seldom represents an acute problem for rebel movements.

Second, the availability of opportunities for women to (formally) participate in organized political violence is inextricably linked to rebel leaders’ willingness to create those opportunities (Thomas and Bond 2015, 489). Regardless of the willingness of a subset of the population to participate in armed rebellion, the organization’s leadership maintains ultimate authority over the recruitment strategy it pursues, including how it defines its pool of potential recruits and whom it ultimately accepts into the movement (see Weinstein 2007). The leadership likewise determines the specific tasks recruits undertake, the roles they occupy in the movement, and their ability to advance in the ranks. As I discussed previously, in many (if not most) rebel organizations, women are either confined to noncombat support roles or completely absent. This implies that rebel leaders often eschew female recruits or restrict their participation to noncombat roles even when some subset of the female population is willing to fight and die on their behalf.

Acknowledging the leadership’s authority over the group’s recruitment decisions minimizes but does not eliminate the influence of supply-side factors in determining the prevalence of female combatants.1 Nor does prioritizing leader strategy formation imply that women are denied agency in the recruitment process. Where recruitment is a nominally voluntary process, I view female potential recruits as agentic actors whose willingness to participate in armed rebellion is shaped by their individual beliefs, preferences, and experiences. Thus, as with male recruits, factors such as prewar political engagement, war-related grievances, and patterns of interaction with armed actors influence their decision to participate (Viterna 2006, 2013). Moreover, where substantial numbers of women have successfully gained entry to armed groups, they have sometimes successfully influenced the group’s strategies and goals. For example, Jennifer Eggert (2018) contends that the presence of female fighters in many of the armed groups in the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s and 1980s was a direct result of women’s efforts to lobby rebel leaders to include them. Anecdotal evidence from numerous other rebellions, including the Sandinista Revolution, Mozambican Independence War, Zimbabwean War of Liberation, and Sri Lankan Civil War, similarly demonstrates that once admitted to the movement women have persuaded reluctant rebel leaders to expand women’s roles and responsibilities, including allowing them participate in combat or assume leadership roles (C. Johnson 1992, 160–161; Luciak 2001a; Lyons 2004, 109–110; Stack-O’Connor 2007b, 97–98).

Similarly, while rebel leaders routinely subordinate women’s interests and issues, the extent to which the group relies on female combatants may determine whether or not the advancement of women’s rights becomes a central part of the rebel group’s political platform. For example, as female participation in the PKK increased in the early 1990s, the group’s attention to issues of women’s rights and their oppressed status in the Kurdish community increases as well (see van Bruinessen 2001, 105–106; White 2015, 146–149). As these examples illustrate, even though the leadership retains ultimate discretion over women’s entry into the movement and the roles they play, women are sometimes able to successfully advance their collective interests within the organization, particularly when the organization relies heavily on their labor and their support.

The key benefit of the framework discussed above is that it permits me to theorize directly about rebel strategy formation. I focus explicitly on the decision-making processes of rebel leaders in order to identify the conditions under which rebel leaders are more likely to perceive that the benefits to recruiting, arming, and deploying women in combat roles outweigh the attendant costs of their inclusion in the armed wing of the unit. I view the recruitment of female combatants as a strategic decision; moreover, it represents only one of multiple potential resource mobilization strategies available to rebel leaders. Whether or not rebel leaders ultimately adopt this strategy depends on the intensity of the demand for such troops and the potential costs they expect to incur from adopting this strategy.

Resource Demands and Female Recruitment

While firms in competitive markets typically respond to increases in labor demands by offering higher wages, the asymmetric nature of internal armed conflict as well as the high risks associated with joining an armed rebellion often inhibit rebel ability to offer sufficient material incentives to address conditions of excess demand. Because the inability to address human resource shortages jeopardizes group survival and diminishes the odds of success, rebel leaders often adopt alternative strategies to address recruitment shortfalls. When conditions of labor scarcity prevail, rebels become more likely to adopt violence and forcible recruitment strategies to acquire necessary resource inputs (see Andvig and Gates 2010; Eck 2014; R. Wood 2014). Violent mobilization strategies, including gunpoint recruitment, abductions, and press-ganging, are indeed a common feature of contemporary internal conflicts (see Cohen 2013a). However, they do not represent the only strategies through which rebels seek to remedy human resource shortfalls; nor are they necessarily the preferred strategies of most groups. Locating alternatives to forcible recruitment may be particularly desirable given that overreliance on such strategies invites international condemnation and costly sanctions that might ultimately impede the group’s ability to achieve its political and military objectives (see Jo 2015).2

An alternative strategy available to many rebel organizations involves redefining the pool of potential recruits and extending opportunities to new groups or subpopulations that the leadership had previously overlooked or intentionally excluded from participation. While rebel leaders might appear to have only minimal ability to manipulate the supply of potential recruits, the historical record demonstrates that state militaries and rebel organizations have often sought to redraw the boundaries separating acceptable and less acceptable recruits. These efforts typically become more common as conflicts drag on and resource demands increase. For example, during World War I the U.S. government initially required all male citizens between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one to register for the draft but later expanded this requirement to the ages of eighteen to forty-five.3 Similarly, acute manpower shortages during the brutal Iran-Iraq War led the Iranian government to call both adolescent boys and elderly men (though mostly the former) into military service (Singer 2006, 22). Military leaders typically exclude children and adolescents from their primary recruitment pool, both because they are widely perceived as suboptimal combatants compared to adults and because deploying them violates domestic and international norms and therefore might provoke condemnation and retaliation by the international community.4 Nonetheless, the voluntary and involuntary recruitment of adolescents and children by state and rebel forces becomes more common when sufficient numbers of adult recruits are unavailable (Achvarina 2010; Lasley and Thyne 2015; Twum-Danso 2003). Related options for expanding the pool of potential recruits include enlisting foreign fighters (Malet 2013) or extending recruitment opportunities to members of ethnic communities other than those that form the movement’s core constituency (Kalyvas 2008).5

How and to what extent rebel leaders seek to define and redefine the pool of potential recruits varies substantially across groups and conflicts. However, factors such as the total size of the subpopulation initially excluded from the supply of acceptable recruits, the physical capabilities of the persons within them, and the anticipated costs associated with recruiting individuals from these subpopulations all likely influence rebel leaders’ decisions regarding who qualifies as an acceptable or unacceptable recruit. All else being equal, rising resource demands should offset some of the concerns that initially led leaders to exclude specific subsets of the population from consideration for recruitment. Thus, leader willingness to accept recruits that they previously viewed potentially costly increases as resource demands become more acute.

Assuming that at least some subset of the female population possesses the physical and psychological qualities necessary to serve in combat and that leaders anticipate no substantial additional costs arising from their recruitment, extending recruitment opportunities to this subset of the population permits leaders to relax the constraints on their supply of potential recruits.6 Arriving at this conclusion does not require assuming that rebel leaders view female recruits as perfect substitutes for male recruits. Even if rebel leaders perceive female combatants as comparatively less desirable than male troops, resource-maximizing leaders should still elect to recruit female fighters because the value of even suboptimal combatants typically exceeds the costs of severe recruitment shortfalls. Consequently, rising resource demands should increase the likelihood that rebel leaders recruit women and deploy them in combat.

The discussion above conceptualizes the demand for female combatants strictly in terms of the human resource needs of the organizations that employ them. Yet, it is important to note that other forms of demand that are not strictly defined by resource needs may also incentivize rebel leaders to recruit, train, and arm women. For example, previous studies suggest that rebel groups often view women as comparatively more effective in carrying out specific types of attacks, such as sabotage, assassinations, terrorism, and other forms of covert violence (e.g., Cunningham 2003; Hamilton 2007, 108–109; O’Rourke 2009). In this sense, women’s perceived superior ability to blend in, evade capture, and get close to targets is viewed as a specific skill that is in high demand for groups that engage in such tactics. The desire to recruit women should therefore be relatively high among groups that routinely utilize such clandestine activities (see Thomas and Bond 2015).

Demand may also increase as rebel leaders begin to recognize women’s potential to deliver additional strategic benefits to the group and seek to capitalize on it. Many rebel groups have instrumentalized women’s presence in the movement in an effort to garner attention, solicit external support, and encourage recruitment (see Cunningham 2003; Speckhard 2008; Viterna 2013). By including images of female combatants in their propaganda materials, explicitly employing women as recruitment agents, or facilitating international media access to its female cadres, rebel leaders may seek to secure strategic benefits from high rates of female participation that are not explicitly connected to the overall human resource needs of the organization. However, these benefits may only become apparent after a substantial number of women have already gained entry to the movement (Stack-O’Connor 2007b, 97). To the extent this is the case, it is difficult to make the case that the expectation of these benefits represents a central motivation for rebel leaders’ initial decision to recruit female combatants. I therefore reserve the discussion of these downstream benefits for a subsequent chapter and focus explicitly on the role of human resource constraints in determining when and why rebel leaders recruit female combatants in this chapter.

The Dilemma of Female Fighters

A potential limitation of the strictly demand-focused recruitment model discussed above is that its predictions rest on the assumption that rebel leaders perceive no substantial costs associated with the decision to recruit female combatants other than the (potential) marginal physical inferiority of these recruits. If this assumption were realistic, we would expect to see rebel movements routinely training, arming, and deploying women in combat whenever they experience human resource demands that dramatically exceed the available supply. Moreover, given that rebel groups often struggle to expand the movement beyond an initial cadre of core supporters, we might expect to see women routinely enter armed resistance movements early in the conflict, when groups are still extremely weak relative to the governments they seek to challenge.

Yet, this is often not the case. Rather, the majority of rebel movements—even those facing chronic manpower shortfalls—refrain from deploying women in combat. Moreover, those groups that eventually elect to extend recruitment opportunities tend to do so relatively late in the conflict or only once the group is well established (Thomas and Bond 2015; Wood and Thomas 2017). Indeed, rebel leaders are often initially reluctant to incorporate women into their group’s fighting force. For instance, while female combatants eventually constituted as much as a third of the Sandinista fighting forces, traditional views of women’s roles in Nicaraguan society initially constrained their participation, and the organization refrained from recruiting women during the early years of the rebellion (Chuchryk 1991, 143–144; Luciak 2001b, 195). Similarly, female combatants were largely absent from the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) in its early years; however, by 1967—three years after the onset of major conflict activities—the group’s leadership created a women’s combat detachment (Urdang 1984, 165; Geisler 2004, 50).7 Lastly, while women were well represented in the African National Congress (ANC) as a whole, through the early 1970s uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the organization’s armed wing, included very few female fighters. However, by the early 1980s women constituted roughly 20 percent of MK’s fighting force (Cock 1991, 41, 161–162; Geisler 2004, 51). In addition to demonstrating leaders’ reluctance to recruit women, these examples also underscore the assertion that many women are willing to participate in a movement, provided an opportunity exists.

An important implication of this discussion is that acute conflict-induced resource demands alone—which rebel groups routinely experience during their wars against the state—cannot fully explain the decision to employ women in combat roles. A compelling explanation for variations in the prevalence of female combatants across armed groups should therefore also explain why so many groups resist recruiting, arming, and deploying female fighters, even as the demand for human resource inputs sharply increases. Addressing this question requires accounting for the factors that influence the strength of rebel leaders’ biases against deploying women in combat roles and their perceptions of the potential costs associated with this strategy. I therefore consider how both the gender attitudes of rebel leaders as well as the attitudes and beliefs of key segments of the society in which the conflict occurs shape leaders’ decisions regarding how to respond to rising resource demands and their overall willingness to use female combatants as a strategy for addressing these demands.

The belief that war is a definitively masculine enterprise is deeply entrenched in most societies. While men are rewarded for risking their lives in combat, women are often characterized as potential victims in need of (male) protection as well as the rewards provided to male combatants for their sacrifices (e.g., Elshtain 1987; Sjoberg 2010). One of the consequences of this dynamic is that women are routinely discouraged from participating in armed groups (J. Goldstein 2001). Military culture is universally hypermasculinized and characterized by beliefs in stereotypical gender roles and the devaluation of feminine traits (Cock 1991, 59–60; Baaz and Stern 2009; Wood and Toppelberg 2017, 624). Military leaders, including those of rebel movements, typically view female combatants as incompatible with their beliefs about how wars should be fought and who should fight them. Particularly, leaders often resist incorporating women because of concerns about their impact on group cohesiveness and combat preparedness (J. Goldstein 2001, 96–98, 200–201; Woodward and Winter 2004). Not only do they doubt women’s ability to endure the physical and emotional rigors of combat, they often fear that the inclusion of female combatants will erode morale, create undue distractions for male soldiers, and generate discord in the ranks.

While military leaders often harbor concerns about these issues, the depth of resistance to female combatants appears to be context dependent. For example, where rebel leaders have had previous exposure to women engaging in high-risk collective or political activism, they appear to be more amenable to incorporating them into an armed movement (Thomas and Wood 2017). Moreover, the specific gender ideologies of the leadership are expected to have a direct impact on the group’s recruitment of female combatants. Specifically, if the leadership is committed to gender equality and women’s rights in society, the group is more likely to recruit female combatants (Thomas and Bond 2015).

The attitudes and beliefs of the constituencies on which rebels rely for support likewise influence the leadership’s willingness to utilize female combatants. Rebel movements often depend heavily on local communities and networks of local power holders (e.g., religious leaders, tribal councils, clan leaders, village headmen, etc.) for support. Moreover, their behaviors and organizational structures are strongly influenced by the social bases from which they arise (Staniland 2014). Directly challenging or contravening the norms and values embraced by these constituencies can prove costly for armed movements, particularly when those values are deeply entrenched and highly salient. Behaviors that radically diverge from local norms or that challenge local customs are likely to create tensions between the rebel group and these communities. Successful rebel movements must therefore carefully navigate their relationships with local constituencies. Positioning women in roles for which they are trained, armed, and instructed to commit violence on behalf of a political movement represents a dramatic deviation from the historical norm and may be perceived by many observers as a direct challenge to deeply engrained social norms regarding women’s place in society. Where women’s participation in organized violence defies prevailing gender norms and threatens existing social hierarchies, rebels potentially risk alienating the local populace by utilizing female fighters. Consequently, the gender beliefs and attitudes of the rebel group’s constituent community partially determine the costs the group expects to incur from using female recruitment to ameliorate human resource constraints.

Gerakan Aceh Merdeka’s (GAM) secessionist rebellion illustrates how expectations of these costs temper leaders’ willingness to use women in combat roles. By the early 2000s, GAM’s lopsided fight against the Indonesian state had become a brutal full-scale civil war. During that period GAM faced rising resource constraints, and it increasingly looked to the international community for support in bringing a negotiated settlement to the conflict (Aspinall 2007, 253–254). Given its need for resources, GAM leaders arguably could have expanded the group’s preexisting network of female members and deployed nontrivial numbers of women in combat roles. In addition to the thousands of women that actively supported the rebels, GAM had provided formal military training to hundreds more, who were deployed to gather intelligence, conduct reconnaissance, transport weapons to the front, and engage in acts of sabotage (Schulze 2003). Yet, even while the group’s leadership used images of young women brandishing assault rifles as a form of “political theater” to draw international attention to the conflict, it generally excluded them from participating in combat (Aspinall 2009, 92–94; Barter 2014, 70; 2015, 349). This inconsistency is intriguing since it suggests that GAM leaders hoped to outwardly cultivate the belief that its forces included female combatants, but they were reluctant to actually send them into battle.

Pinpointing the specific motivations for the decision to circumscribe women’s roles in the group is difficult. Yet, the traditionalist values of the organization and the community it relied on for support likely played an important role in this decision. GAM did not espouse an explicitly fundamentalist ideology. While the group traced its roots to the earlier, Islamist Darul Islam rebellion, the later incarnation fighting in the 1990s adopted a predominantly secular nationalist ideology (Aspinall 2007). Nonetheless, its leaders viewed Islam as a central component of Acehnese culture, and Islamic beliefs were highly influential in the development the group’s political ideology. Moreover, GAM drew much of its support from rural parts of the Aceh, where traditionalist Islam was dominant (Aspinall 2009, 203–204). Given the nature of its support base, GAM’s leaders likely perceived expanding women’s roles as a potentially costly strategy that might alienate an important constituency that was deeply religious and held very traditional views on women’s role in society. Consequently, despite the benefits GAM might have received from expanding women’s participation in the group, the rebellion remained “almost exclusively a movement of men” (Aspinall 2009, 93).

Evidence of such costs is also visible in cases where rebels ultimately recruited substantial numbers of female combatants. For example, ZANLA’s incorporation of female fighters and its nominal effort to expand women’s rights in the areas under its control during the Zimbabwean War of Liberation generated resistance and resentment from male villagers and local leaders. While these adverse reactions did not fundamentally alter the group’s reliance on female combatants, its leaders subsequently curtailed some of its domestic efforts to promote women’s rights and equality (Kesby 1996; Kriger 1992, 194–196). Similarly, in Ethiopia, despite the large number of female fighters in the TPLF, its leaders eventually sought to constrain female recruitment, in part because male peasants and village leaders in some areas complained that the high rates at which women had joined the organization had destabilized domestic life in the countryside and upset the traditional social order (Young 1997, 180–181). These examples demonstrate that concerns over the social acceptability of female combatants can shape rebel leaders’ decisions regarding female recruitment, even for groups that have already made the decision to mobilize women for war. In these cases, however, the leadership’s commitment to social revolution (particularly for the Marxist-Leninist TPLF) and limited reliance on local patriarchal power structures to mobilize support likely muted the costs incurred by the recruitment of female combatants.8 By contrast, groups that rely extensively on support from constituencies that hold deeply patriarchal attitudes are more likely to be sensitive to the potential costs of recruiting women and deploying them in combat.

Taken together, the previous discussions point to the combination of the intensity of the resource demands faced by a group and its leaders’ (and base community’s) underlying beliefs about the appropriateness of women directly participating in armed conflict as central factors in determining leaders’ decisions about female recruitment. On the one hand, rebels can choose to ease their resource constraints by recruiting female combatants, but in doing so they risk incurring social or political costs for violating prevailing (and often deeply embedded) norms defining acceptable gender-based divisions of labor. Alternatively, they can forego female recruitment, which avoids concerns about violating gender norms but artificially constrains the number of potential recruits (i.e., supply) available to the armed group.

How rebels perceive the trade-off between expected resource gains and potential costs represents the central dilemma of female recruitment. Whether (and to what extent) the rebel leadership is willing to utilize female combatants therefore depends on both the severity of the resource constraints the group faces and the extent to which rebel leaders are sensitive to the potential costs associated with including them in the fighting force. This observation implies the existence of two types of rebel groups: those for whom recruiting women and deploying them in combat roles represents a nominal cost that is ultimately outweighed by the risk posed by rising resource constraints, and those for whom this action represents such a direct contradiction to the ideals of the movement or its community that the expected costs of the decision exceed any benefits the group might derive from expanding the pool of recruits to include female combatants.

War Costs, Ideology, and the Mobilization of Women for War

Above I described a generalized model of rebel recruitment decisions where female recruitment is a function of the group’s overall demand for human resources, but where leaders’ sensitivity to the costs associated with mobilizing women conditions the influence of those demands. In this section, I more fully develop this argument and specify the observable factors that determine a rebel group’s demand for female combatants and its leaders’ sensitivity to their recruitment. Specifically, I link the demand for female combatants to the overall severity of the conflict and the acute need for troops produced by periods of intense fighting, sustained troop losses, or rebel efforts to rapidly expand the rebellion. I also highlight the role of group political ideology in shaping leaders’ willingness to transgress or challenge extant social norms and hierarchies and their baseline beliefs about the appropriateness of allowing women to participate in armed movements. I therefore conceive of ideology as a proxy for group leaders’ sensitivity to the costs associated with utilizing female combatants. Ultimately, it is the interaction of these factors that determines the prevalence of female combatants in a rebel movement.

Conflict Severity and Resource Constraints

Successful rebel groups require substantial inputs of both human and material resources in order to achieve their broad political and military goals. As such, ensuring a continuing supply of recruits to send into combat—as well as troops to conduct the manifold other critical tasks necessary to maintaining the rebellion—becomes a central intermediate-term goal of any rebel movement. As the conflict intensifies, war costs mount, requiring increasing inputs of both human and material resources to sustain the movement. Failure to sustain the human resource needs of the rebellion increases the likelihood of rebel failure and defeat.

As with the case of the Yugoslav Partisans that introduced this chapter, evidence from a variety of rebellions suggests that the decision to recruit women and ultimately to train, arm, and deploy them in combat corresponds closely to periods of increasing conflict severity and acute human resource pressures. Leda Stott (1990, 27), for example, asserts that a shortage of male recruits in the early 1970s pressured the leaders of the Zimbabwean resistance movements to expand women’s roles in the groups and to eventually deploy them in combat. Gisela Geisler’s (2004) interviews with former ZANLA combatants and political leaders paint a similar picture of the “necessities of war” forcing the armed movement to reevaluate its position on training and arming female guerrillas and to its eventual decision to “broaden the revolutionary base” by promoting women’s direct participation in the struggle. Similarly, rather than reflecting a feminist agenda or a commitment to equality, the dramatic increase in women’s recruitment into the LTTE in the mid-1980s appears to have been a strategic response to the acute need for more fighters that resulted from the heavy losses sustained by the group in previous years (Alison 2003, 39; Herath 2012, 57, 77). The leadership of Sendero Luminoso appears to have come to a similar conclusion regarding women’s potential contributions after experiencing mounting causalities during the escalation of its war against the Peruvian government (Cordero 1998, 352). Likewise, the intensification of the Vietnam War and the corresponding increase in U.S. troop levels after 1965 imposed severe resource demands on the Communist insurgency, which in turn encouraged its leaders to utilize women as fighters (Taylor 1999, 37).9 Jocelyn Viterna (2013, 63) similarly describes the relationship between war costs and female recruitment in El Salvador in the following way: “The FMLN needed female guerrillas. Its high mortality levels early in the war created a personnel shortage that could not be filled by recruiting men alone.” Finally, Margaret Poulos Anagnostopoulou (2001, 488–489) contends that acute manpower shortages in the Greek Democratic Army necessitated the mobilization (and eventual conscription) of women during the Greek Civil War.

Shelli Israelsen (2018) offers one of the most explicit analyses of the connection between resource demands and female recruitment. She argues that female recruitment closely maps to specific phases of civil conflict and contends that rebel groups are less likely to recruit women during the guerilla phase of the conflict, when the balance of power is highly asymmetrical and rebels routinely engage in hit-and-run tactics. However, these groups become comparatively more likely to recruit women during the later civil war phase of the conflict, when they are militarily more capable and better able to exert control over territory and populations. Her analysis of women’s participation in the LTTE in Sri Lanka and the Karen National Union (KNU) in Myanmar provides support for this claim, demonstrating that in those cases the decision to deploy female combatants was a reflection of the intensity of the conflict and the need for troops. Importantly, her analysis also highlights the role that group gender ideology played in the decision, serving as a facilitating factor in the case of the LTTE and a constraining factor in the KNU. I return to the latter point below.

Resource demands also help explain one of the few cases of large-scale female mobilization to state military forces. As many as one million women may have participated in the Soviet Red Army and related irregular units during World War II, representing as much as 8 percent of the total force. Of these female soldiers, perhaps half a million reportedly served at the front, and 250,000 received military training (Campbell 1993; J. Goldstein 2001, 65–70; Pennington 2010).10 According to Joshua Goldstein (2001, 70), extreme resource demands and the perceived existential threat represented by German advances played a central role in the state’s decision to deploy women in frontline combat. Indeed, by the apex of the conflict the Soviet Union had mobilized some 90 percent of its male population in the war effort, suggesting that the country had literally run out of men to send to the front. While women had previously contributed to the war effort and many served in the military in noncombat roles, acute human resource pressures during 1942 and 1943 contributed to the Soviet leadership’s decision to allow women to participate in combat roles on a voluntary basis.

Evidence from a variety of cases broadly supports the predictions of a demand-side model of female recruitment. All else being equal, as conflict intensity increases, rebel leaders become increasingly likely to create opportunities for women to participate in the movements as a means of ameliorating rapidly rising demands for human resource inputs. Yet, all is not equal across armed groups. As I elaborate in the subsequent section, ideology exerts a strong influence on groups’ willingness to use female recruitment to address severe resource demands.

Group Political Ideology

Leaders’ perceptions of the costs associated with female recruitment derive from their personal beliefs about the inherent incompatibility of women and armed combat, fears that introducing female combatants will diminish morale or sow discord in the ranks, and concerns that recruiting women will diminish support from the communities on which the group relies for other resources. The specific factors that generate and define these costs are often unobservable because they reflect the beliefs, values, and norms of the relevant actors or groups. The leaders of some rebel movements explicitly espouse a commitment to gender egalitarianism, which might signal that they either anticipate minimal costs from recruiting women or that by virtue of their convictions they are willing to tolerate such costs if they do occur. Jakana Thomas and Kanisha Bond’s (2015) findings are suggestive of such a relationship, but they do not examine this question directly.

Yet, the absence of a formal position on gender equality is not necessarily indicative of a group’s opposition to recruiting women and deploying them in combat. Moreover, some critics—both former female combatants and scholars—have asserted that the rhetoric of gender equality espoused by rebel groups rarely reflects a true commitment to egalitarianism and the advancement of women’s rights (especially in the postconflict environment) (e.g., Kampwirth 2004; Nhongo-Simbanegavi 2000). Consequently, it is important to identify additional factors that reveal a movement’s underlying tolerance for female combatants or the extent to which it perceives the deployment of women in battle as a potentially costly strategy.

In addition to a group’s rhetorical commitment to gender equality, various group-level characteristics should reflect the baseline attitudes of the leadership and the group’s constituents toward the inclusion of women in the group’s combat force. Most importantly, the political ideology that a group espouses signals important information regarding its attitudes toward traditional social norms and hierarchies, including those related to gender roles and gender-based divisions of labor (Wood and Thomas 2017).11 I follow recent studies and define political ideology as the package of ideas or beliefs that declares the grievances or aspirations of a particular social group, identifies a specific set of political or social objectives on behalf of that group, and proposes a course of action through which the group intends to accomplish those objectives (Gutiérrez Sanín and Wood 2014, 215).12 More broadly, scholars often conceive of ideology as representing a shared set of inter-related beliefs regarding the appropriate order of society and how that order should be achieved (e.g., Jost, Federico, and Napier 2009, 309). Thus, ideology reflects not only the specific political objectives the group pursues and its strategy for attaining them but also its vision for the ideal type of social order it seeks to establish.

Because gender hierarchies and gender-based divisions of labor are prominent, and often fundamental, characteristics of systems of social order (e.g., Epstein 1989; Lorber 1994), the political ideology espoused by an organization reveals the attitudes, preferences, and beliefs regarding the appropriate roles for women within the model society endorsed by its leadership, members, and supporters. The specific political ideology a group adopts therefore reflects not only the rebel leadership’s underlying personal attitudes and biases toward the deployment of women in combat roles but also informs its perceptions of the expected costs associated with this decision. Specifically, where women’s participation in combat is perceived as a threat to the desired social order reflected in the group’s ideology, leaders are likely to anticipate substantial costs from this decision and thus to resist employing women in combat roles as a strategy for managing resource constraints.

Women’s participation in armed combat is often viewed as a threat to the extant (ubiquitously patriarchal) social order specifically because it represents a direct challenge to embedded gender norms and projects an image of female empowerment and liberation (MacDonald 1987, 3–4). For groups espousing orthodox, traditionalist, or fundamentalist ideologies, employing women in roles that directly contradict the traditional social order is both morally unpalatable to the leadership (and presumably to the rank and file as well) and risks alienating the constituencies whose interests the group claims to represent. Thus, the perceived costs associated with deploying women in combat are potentially quite high for the leaders of these groups.

By contrast, groups that seek to upend the traditional social order are likely to perceive comparatively few additional costs (and may perceive benefits) from the decision to employ female combatants—after all, they are already engaging in revolutionary action and have likely already decided that the backlash from conservative or reactionary elements of society are an acceptable cost to bear in pursuit of their objectives. Leaders of rebel groups whose ideology rejects or directly challenges traditional social hierarchies or explicitly promotes gender equality are therefore more likely to employ female combatants than leaders of groups whose ideology advocates preserving such hierarchies and supports traditional gender-based divisions of labor, which typically result in the subordination of women in society and their exclusion from traditionally male-dominated enterprises, including warfare.13

Because I am predominantly interested in ideologies that instantiate clear attitudes and beliefs regarding gender hierarchies and societal gender norms, I focus most directly on the opposing perspectives of staunchly secular (often antireligious), revolutionary leftist ideologies (e.g., Marxism, Leninism, Maoism) and orthodox or extremist religious ideologies (e.g., Islamism or Christian fundamentalism). Broadly speaking, these ideologies represent opposing poles on an ideological spectrum, particularly with respect to beliefs about gender norms and hierarchies.

Other ideologies, including variants of social liberalism, conservatism, fascism, occupy the space between the poles. For instance, groups embracing social liberal ideologies are more likely to support gender equality, exhibit more feminist attitudes, and challenge embedded gender norms than those embracing social conservatism, rightist, or orthodox religious ideologies. However, such groups do not typically advocate fundamentally remaking society or necessarily seek to subvert embedded social norms. By contrast, despite women’s frequent participation in rightist political movements and armed groups, including groups adopting fascist ideologies, these groups have generally taken distinctly antifeminist positions with respect to women’s roles in society and have often adopted positions that reflect essentialist beliefs regarding differences between men and women. For instance, fascist political movements in Europe in the early twentieth century frequently viewed women’s primary role to be bearing and raising children, advocated the subordination of women and their removal from the workforce, and sought to otherwise reinforce traditional gender hierarchies and roles (de Grazia 1992; Durham 1998). Similarly, right-wing extremist groups in the United States, including the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nation, count many women among their members but typically advocate traditional family structures and obedience to traditional gender norms (Blee 1996). Lastly, it is important not to conflate nationalism with right-wing extremist beliefs, despite the frequency with which they appear in tandem. Nationalism does not map easily onto the left-right spectrum and often intersects with and borrows from other ideologies. I therefore discuss it separately below. Figure 1.1 illustrates the placement of political ideologies on the spectrum of attitudes toward traditional gender norms.

Figure 1.1 Commitment to traditional norms in selected political ideologies

A group’s religiosity represents the primary dimension of its ideological orientation relevant to leadership’s attitudes toward employing women in combat roles. I focus principally on this dimension because numerous studies have drawn strong connections between an individual’s (or group’s) level of religiosity and its attitudes and/or practices regarding gender equality and sex roles in society (e.g., Davis and Greenstein 2009, 94–95; Hertel and Hughes 1987; Inglehart and Norris, 2003; Peek, Lowe, and Williams 1991; Sherkat and Ellison 1999, 372). Overall, these studies conclude that individuals with greater levels of religiosity and those affiliated with ultra-orthodox or fundamentalist religious organizations are more likely to display in-egalitarian attitudes toward women than those who are secular or who are affiliated with less conservative religious groups.

Moreover, across different religions and cultures, fundamentalist beliefs and affiliations are positively related to support for patriarchal structures and adherence to traditional gender norms, both within families and in broader society (see Emerson and Hartman 2006, 135–136; Grasmick, Wilcox, and Bird 1990). Indeed, articulating and enforcing traditional gender roles represents a central concern of most groups that espouse fundamentalist ideologies (Beit-Hallahmi 2005, 28–29; Emerson and Hartman 2006, 135–136). Consequently, compared to secular political movements, those that embrace traditionalist, orthodox, or fundamentalist religious ideologies are much more likely to advocate for the (re)establishment of a social order in which men and women conform to traditional norms and where clear (male-dominant) gender hierarchies and divisions of labor exist.

RELIGIOUS IDEOLOGIES AND WOMEN’S PARTICIPATION IN POLITICAL VIOLENCE

The influence of religion on gender ideology should also be apparent in the ways in which women participate in armed resistance movements. Many women identify with fundamentalist and ultraorthodox social and political movements, and many are willing to mobilize on their behalf (e.g., Ben Shitrit 2016; Blaydes and Linzer 2008). The strength of their religious beliefs and support for the groups’ social and political agendas help explain their willingness to engage in collective action in support of the groups. Moreover, at least some subset of women who hold fundamentalist beliefs are willing to support and actively participate in violent religious extremist movements. For example, Islamist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS; the right-wing Hindu nationalist movement Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh; and violent ultra-Orthodox Jewish settler groups in Israel each count substantial numbers of women among their members. Despite women’s prevalence in these groups, their roles typically conform to the traditional gender norms and hierarchies articulated in the movements’ religious ideologies. This does not imply that female members of these organizations eschew violence—indeed, women have both supported and participated in violence on behalf of these groups in some instances. However, in the vast majority of cases, armed movements that embrace extremist or fundamentalist religious ideologies attempt to exclude women from roles that contradict the traditional patriarchal structures and gender norms embraced by the group.

Women’s participation in militant Islamist movements illustrates the role religious ideology plays in shaping rebel leaderships’ attitudes toward women in combat roles.14 Like most other fundamentalist and orthodox groups, armed Islamist political movements generally reject the notion that a secular society can produce appropriate societal norms and instead believe that religious texts (the Qur’an and Hadith) should serve as the basis for social order. Consistent with these beliefs, they strive to reassert traditional social structures and patterns of social order, including the reinforcement or imposition of traditional gender roles and hierarchies (Beit-Hallahmi 2005; Moghadam 2003; Robinson, Crenshaw, and Jenkins 2006). The leaders of such movements are therefore likely to eschew the inclusion of female combatants because they perceive women’s participation in organized violence alongside men as antithetical to their own beliefs regarding the appropriate social order. In addition, to the extent that the group’s (male) fighters hold similar views, efforts to incorporate women are likely to be met with resistance and resentment, thus undermining group cohesion and impeding the movement’s ability to achieve its objectives. A consequence of this commitment to traditional gender norms is that women are typically absent from military and political leadership roles and combat roles or appear in them only in small numbers and under exceptional circumstances.

The potential for backlash from a group’s constituency represents an additional constraint on groups’ willingness to utilize female fighters. For rebel groups that espouse orthodox religious ideologies, and are therefore likely to rely heavily on support from communities that hold deep-seated traditionalist attitudes toward women’s roles in society, the use of female combatants represents a potentially costly strategy. As Nelly Lahoud (2014, 794) notes, the orthodox religious audience to which Islamist groups appeal for support is unlikely to support the large-scale deployment of women on the battlefield. Furthermore, Islamist groups have often undertaken substantial efforts to justify and legitimize the use of female suicide bombers to their conservative base communities (Gonzalez-Perez 2011; Davis 2013, 284; Von Knop 2007, 412).

That the leaders of these movements felt compelled to engage in these efforts suggests that the staunchly traditional communities on which Islamist groups rely for support have often been reluctant to accept this strategy, and it further implies that the large-scale deployment of women in combat would be met with resistance and possibly condemnation by its members. In other words, while this audience may tolerate—and even rally behind—the occasional female martyr, the acts of training, arming, and deploying substantial numbers of women in battle represent a direct challenge to the social order that this audience values and seeks to protect. The use of female suicide bombers, however, limits the overall number of women directly engaging in violence, thus allowing Islamist groups to frame their deployment as an exceptional strategy for exceptional circumstances rather than a broader, more consistent strategy that would potentially fundamentally alter the group’s composition and its impact on society.

The disposable nature of suicide bombers also reduces the potential impact that violent, politically engaged women might have on traditional society. Because there are no female excombatants in the case of (successful) suicide bombers, there is no challenge in reintegrating them into society once the war ends and no potential pressures from groups of politically engaged women who might demand greater rights or opportunities as a result of their service to the cause (Davis 2013, 288). By limiting women’s violent roles to suicide bombings, radical Islamist groups are therefore able to benefit from the strategic and tactical advantages they offer while minimizing the potential threats female fighters present to the groups’ political ideologies and reducing the likelihood of significant backlash from their constituent communities. For these reasons, the overall prevalence of female fighters within Islamist rebellions is likely to be quite low.

While I have primarily discussed the influence of gender ideology on women’s roles in radical Islamist groups, I anticipate that a similar relationship obtains in other religious fundamentalist rebellions. The general argument regarding the relationship between fundamentalist ideologies and the prevalence of female combatants should apply regardless of the specific religion of a movement. In other words, rebel groups motivated by fundamentalist ideologies, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and so on, are likely to enforce traditional gender-based divisions of labor within their ranks and therefore generally exclude women from combat roles.

MARXISM, WOMEN, AND VIOLENT REVOLUTION

Marxist-oriented ideologies and fundamentalist religious ideologies occupy opposite poles on the ideological spectrum, particularly with respect to the value they place on traditional social norms and hierarchies. While fundamentalist religious movements seek to protect traditional social hierarchies, rebel movements embracing Marxism (and its offshoots) typically seek to reshape existing social hierarchies. Moreover, the groups’ gender attitudes are subsumed under this broader orientation toward social hierarchies. Fundamentalist movements openly pronounce their support for patriarchy and traditional gender roles. By contrast, Marxist-inspired groups often advocate (at least rhetorically) for greater gender egalitarianism and the expansion of women’s rights.

Importantly, Marxist groups’ rhetoric does not necessarily reflect a commitment to feminism as such. Rather, Marxist philosophy tends to view traditional social structures, including gender hierarchies, as an impediment to the liberation of the populace as a whole (Brown 2012, 12; L. Goldstein 1980, 331–332). Thus, for Marx, liberating women was not a central objective as much as it was part of a strategy of revolutionary liberation more broadly. Like Marx, Mao Zedong contended that equality for women represented a crucial step in the national revolution (Yuan 2005, 51–54) and identified women’s subordination as one of the feudal-patriarchal systems that must be overturned. However, he believed that their liberation would naturally come as a part of the political and economic conflict in which they were engaged (K. A. Johnson 1983, 41). Nonetheless, Mao believed that the success of the revolution depended in part on the mobilization of women, and his recruitment strategy explicitly called for their inclusion in the movement (Gautam, Banskota, and Manchanda, 2001; K. A. Johnson 1983).

Subsequent rebel movements espousing variants of Marxist or Maoist ideologies have frequently adopted similar perspectives on the importance of gender egalitarianism and women’s rights in furthering revolutions and similarly sought to more directly integrate women into the armed wings of their movements. However, consistent with their ideological roots, this effort had less do with feminism and more to do with the core principles of liberating all people from the tyranny of class structures and social hierarchies. Thus, in many cases the emancipation of women was seen as more a matter of economic independence, guaranteed by their integration into the workplaces of a new socialist society. Furthermore, for many Marxist-inspired movements, women represented a revolutionary force that could “neither be ignored nor allowed to pursue their own agenda” (Geisler 2004, 45–48). Many Marxist rebel groups therefore felt compelled to incorporate women because they were necessary for the success of the movement and because doing do was broadly consistent with the movement’s ideology, not because of any deep commitment to feminism, which they often regarded as a bourgeois construction. For instance, while FARC’s leftist ideology superseded the conservative patriarchal values of the society in which it existed, creating the opportunity to recruit women, its decision to do so was based at least partly on strategic considerations and the belief that recruiting female combatants was politically and militarily advantageous (Herrera and Porch 2008; Gutiérrez Sanín and Carranza Franco 2017). Similarly, Victoria Bernal (2000, 71) argues that the EPLF slogan “No Liberation Without Women’s Participation,” suggests that the group’s leadership believed that victory necessitated women’s support, and thus women’s emancipation became a means to that end. The recruitment poster pictured in figure 1.2 reflects a similar sentiment.

Figure 1.2 EPLF poster (Ethiopia), published by the Eritrean Women’s Association in Europe, 1980.

Source: Image courtesy of Basler Afrika Bibliographien

Nonetheless, many Marxist and related leftist movements have made gender equality and women’s rights core components of their political agenda. For example, in areas it controlled, Mao’s revolutionary government passed laws that extended numerous rights to women, including suffrage, property ownership, equal pay, and freedom of marriage and divorce (K. A. Johnson 1983, 53–55).15 While the EPLF leadership no doubt sought to instrumentalize women’s liberation, it nonetheless made advancing women’s status an important aspect of their fight against colonialism and the “backward, reactionary, and feudal elements of traditional society” (Bernal 2000, 66–67). Moreover, the group advocated gender equality and implemented numerous policies to advance women’s rights in the areas it controlled (Bernal 2000; Coulter, Person, and Utas 2008, 10; Matsuoka and Sorenson 2001, 122). Similarly, the CPN-M directly challenged the traditional social, religious, and gender hierarchies of Nepalese society (Subedi 2013, 439–440). The group’s leadership also made gender egalitarianism and the expansion of women’s rights an explicit part of their platform and viewed women’s participation in the revolution as a critical factor in its success (Gautam, Banskota, and Manchanda 2001; Manchanda 2004; Subedi 2013). The Marxist orientation of the leaderships of the FMLN in El Salvador and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua also led both groups to oppose patriarchal structures that limited women’s opportunities and status in their societies and to propose policies aimed at promoting gender egalitarianism and advancing women’s rights (Lobao 1990, 222–225; Kampwirth 2002; Reif 1986). As Norma Stoltz Chinchilla (1990) asserts, despite the frequent lack of attention to women-specific issues in orthodox Marxism, the specific political platforms adopted by these groups were largely consistent with modern Western feminism.

These examples illustrate the stated commitment of Marxist groups to challenging social hierarchies that restrict women’s freedom and demonstrate the frequency with which they employ these perspectives in their rhetoric. This implies a close connection between the gender ideologies often present in Marxist-oriented rebel groups and the willingness of the leadership to utilize female fighters.16 This contention dovetails with the empirical evidence that female fighters are more common in armed groups that espouse gender egalitarianism (Thomas and Bond 2015). However, two additional factors beyond Marxist leaders’ potential commitments to gender egalitarianism that may impact their comparative acceptance of female combatants deserve discussion.

First, a common feature of all Marxist-inspired organizations is their goal of dismantling traditional social hierarchies and replacing them with a starkly different form of revolutionary order. Openly advocating such goals signals the group’s willingness to absorb substantial costs for challenging the status quo. This cost tolerance should extend to any backlash anticipated from training and arming women to fight on behalf of the organization. The decision to deploy female combatants should represent only a marginal additional cost to those the group already incurs from its efforts to oust traditional village elders and minimize (if not outright demolish) the power of religious authorities, all of which are common objectives in Marxist rebellions. In other words, Marxist-inspired rebel organizations are likely to be less sensitive to issues associated with the recruitment of female combatants compared to armed groups espousing other ideologies.

Second, by virtue of their personal histories, leaders of Marxist rebellions are comparatively more likely than leaders of movements espousing other ideologies to possess positive assessments of women’s capabilities, thus leading to them be more positively inclined toward women’s participation in armed rebellion. Specifically, the leaders of leftist rebellions are heavily drawn from student political movements, trade unions, and other urban activist networks.17 While women are often excluded from armed rebel movements, they routinely engage in high-risk collective action through their participation in these organizations. These contexts provide women opportunities to demonstrate their resolve, commitment, and skills to their male colleagues, which in turn help convince the leaders of Marxist rebellions that women possess the capabilities to participate in armed rebellion (Thomas and Wood 2018). As such, via their prior exposure to women who risked their lives for the cause in a nonviolent capacity, the leaders of Marxist rebel groups may be more positively inclined to accept women in the armed wing of the movement.

NATIONALISM AND OTHER IDEOLOGIES

The middle ground between these two poles of Marxist and orthodox religious ideologies is populated with a range of ideologies that place more or less emphasis on the importance of traditional hierarchies and norms in their ideal social order. For instance, groups adopting conservative or traditionalist ideologies short of religious fundamentalism are comparatively more likely to emphasize traditional social norms compared to those with liberal ideologies short of Marxism. Overall, I anticipate that the closer a group’s ideology is to one of these poles, the greater effect the ideology exerts on the group’s gender attitudes and thus its willingness to recruit women into the armed wing of the movement. However, I do not attempt to explicitly theorize on the specific effects of any particular ideology located within this intermediate space between Marxism (and related ideologies) and religious fundamentalism (and its various manifestations).

The one additional ideological type I briefly consider is nationalism. At its core, nationalism is the political principle that the political and national units should correspond to each other. Nationalist sentiment, however, is the compulsion to resist the violation of this principle and set it right again (Gellner 2008, 1–2). In terms of organizational goals, nationalist movements pursue independent states for their kinship groups and generally assert that adherents offer their loyalty to this group above all other affiliations (Van Evera 1994, 6). This includes both anticolonial self-determination movements and secessionist movements. Importantly, while nationalist groups advocate agendas based largely on group claims to autonomy or the superiority of an in-group over other groups, no broader sets of beliefs are common to all nationalist groups (Freeden 1998). That is, the defining element of nationalism is the pursuit of the nation, and nationalist groups frequently graft various components of other ideologies onto their core belief in national independence. Consequently, nationalism takes many forms and can reflect a range of additional ideological influences, including elements of Marxism, fascism, or religious fundamentalism.

Several scholars contend that nationalist agendas and ideals often serve to disempower, control, and repress women (Mayer 2002; Nagel 1998; Yuval-Davis 1993). However, because nationalist groups often import elements of other ideologies, the influence of nationalism on gender attitudes—and thus the group’s willingness to contravene traditional social norms by recruiting female fighters—may depend more on the other ideological traditions on which the group draws than on its specific commitment to nationalism. For instance, many nationalist movements that employ substantial numbers of female combatants—including SWAPO in Namibia, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) in Spain, and ZANLA in Zimbabwe/Rhodesia—incorporate aspects of Marxist or Maoist ideology into their political platforms, which likely influence their attitudes toward women’s participation in the movement.18 Other movements, however, infuse their nationalist agendas with religious ideologies. The Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the Philippines blend fundamentalist Islamist beliefs with nationalist ideologies rooted in the goal of an independent Moro-Islamic state. Moreover, both limit women’s participation in their respective organizations, and neither permits women to serve in combat roles.

As this discussion highlights, nationalist ideologies often incorporate traditionalist views of women’s roles in society. However, in practice these ideologies often lack specificity in terms of their perspective on gender, and nationalist movements frequently incorporate elements from other ideologies into their own political platforms. These might include aspects of ideologies that adopt more expansive and progressive views of women’s roles in society or those that are much more restrictive. Consequently, when isolated from other intersecting ideologies, nationalist ideologies are likely to have little direct influence on the prevalence of female fighters in an armed group.

Summary and Testable Hypotheses

This chapter presents a demand-side explanation for variations in the prevalence of female fighters across rebel movements. The argument focuses primarily on the factors shaping rebel demand for female fighters because rebel leadership, which is ubiquitously male-dominated, acts as the gatekeeper in the recruitment process and ultimately decides how it plans to recruit and whom. Thus, even where a substantial supply of women are willing to engage in high-risk collective action on behalf of a movement, rebel leaders determine how many women (if any) they will recruit into the group’s armed wing as well as whether or not they will train, equip, and deploy them in combat.

I identified two factors that potentially help explain variations in the prevalence of female combatants across different armed resistance movements: growing resource demands and the group’s political ideology. With respect to the former, I asserted that as rising war costs increase the demand for human resource inputs, rebel leaders are incentivized to increase recruitment in order to maintain the viability of the rebellion. While military leaders are initially reluctant to recruit women, the cost of failing to meet their human resource demands is an increase in the likelihood of the group’s demise and a decline in the odds that it will achieve its objectives. I therefore expect female combatants to become more prevalent in a rebel movement as resource pressures become more acute. Given that most civil conflicts are characterized by asymmetric conflict, in which the government possesses a militarily superior combat force, rebels face persistent resource constraints. However, these constraints are likely to become more acute as the conflict intensifies. During periods of rapid conflict escalation, rebels experience greater numbers of troop losses and must more rapidly locate recruits to replace those troops killed or captured in the fighting in order to avoid defeat. I therefore hypothesize that the prevalence of female combatants are predicted by the intensity of the conflict. I formalize this claim in the following hypothesis:

H1: The prevalence of female combatants increases as the severity of the conflict increases.

The second factor I identified as relevant to determining the prevalence of female combatants in an armed group is that its baseline willingness to challenge extant social norms by training and deploying women to commit violence shapes the likelihood of female recruitment. Specifically, a group’s ideology identifies its position on preserving or challenging existing social orders, hierarchies, and norms. This often extends to the group’s commitment to prevailing gender norms and gender-based divisions of labor. As such, the group’s ideology strongly influences the leadership’s baseline tolerance for opposition to incorporating women into the organization’s military wing. Similarly, ideology should determine the group’s perception of the potential costs associated with utilizing women in combat. Overall, leaders of movements that seek to overturn rather than reaffirm traditional hierarchies—such as those groups espousing Marxist or Maoist ideologies—are more likely to tolerate the inclusion of female combatants and are less likely to fear repercussions from their constituents for doing so. While most Marxist-oriented groups are not explicitly feminist, many have adopted platforms and policies that at least rhetorically seek to provide women more equal status in their societies. I therefore hypothesize:

H2: Female combatants are more prevalent among rebel groups espousing Marxist or other leftist political ideologies compared to groups adopting other political ideologies.

By contrast, groups espousing orthodox and fundamentalist religious ideologies often seek to reestablish or reinforce traditional social orders in which clear gender hierarchies exist and in which traditional gender norms prevail. Leaders of groups that embrace orthodox and fundamentalist religious ideologies are likely to oppose the use of female combatants because it conflicts with their core beliefs about appropriate gender roles and the organization of society. In addition, they are likely to anticipate backlash from the base communities upon which they rely for support if they elect to train, arm, and deploy women in combat in substantial numbers. Thus, while the image of a woman carrying a Kalashnikov over her shoulder and a baby in her arms may be perfectly consistent with the social revolutionary ideology of Marxist movements, such images—and the values they represent—are largely anathema to orthodox religious movements. To be clear, many women play important and active roles in armed groups that embrace orthodox or fundamentalist ideologies; yet, the roles women play within these organizations largely conform to the traditional gender norms and hierarchies articulated in the movement’s religious ideology. In other words, the leadership of armed orthodox religious movements attempts to ensure that women do not assume roles that contradict the social norms for which they advocate. I therefore expect that groups that espouse such religious ideologies will be highly unlikely to deploy women in combat roles.

H3: Female combatants are less prevalent among rebel groups espousing religious political ideologies compared to rebel groups adopting other political ideologies.

Finally, taken together, the arguments presented in this chapter suggest that the influence of ideology exerts a moderating influence on rebel leaders’ willingness to accept women into the armed wing of the movement and deploy them as fighters as a strategy for managing acute resource demands. All else being equal, rebel movements become more likely to utilize female fighters as conflict-induced resource demands increase. Yet, as the discussion above highlights, not all groups respond to resource pressures in the same way. Rebel leaders that maintain a higher level of latent resistance to transgressing social norms or perceive greater costs from their base communities are less likely to respond to rising resource demands by recruiting women. In practical terms, rebel movements espousing orthodox religious ideologies are most resistant to the inclusion of female fighters and will typically resist doing so even in the face of severe resource constraints. This suggests an interactive effect between ideology and conflict costs.

H4: The presence of a religious fundamentalist ideology conditions the influence of conflict severity on the prevalence of female combatants.