Understanding Women’s Participation in Armed Resistance
Until recently, scholars of political violence have largely overlooked women’s participation in armed conflict, and many still consider it a peripheral area of inquiry. In part, this view is based on the assumption that men—and almost exclusively men—fight wars, and women, when they do appear in the ranks of armed groups, are simply novelties or outliers. This narrow perspective, however, ignores the important contributions that women have made to the various rebel movements for which they have fought (and often died). Moreover, this view fails to appreciate the extent to which the recruitment of female fighters contravenes embedded social norms, and it thus unintentionally minimizes the gravity of this decision for both the rebel leadership and the women that take up arms. One observable consequence for the construction of social science theory is that while civil conflict scholars have developed a sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms and processes driving civil war onset, rebel resource mobilization, conflict outcomes, and other aspects of internal conflict dynamics, issues such as women’s contributions to civil conflicts, the factors motivating their entry into armed groups, and the implications of their presence in these organizations—and for the societies to which they will ultimately return once the violence subsides—remain poorly understood.
Fortunately, however, scholars have increasingly devoted attention to the phenomenon of women’s participation in armed nonstate political organizations in recent years. Detailed qualitative investigations of specific cases have highlighted the pathways though which women enter armed groups; assessed the motives for their mobilization, which are often very similar to those of male combatants; and identified the social conditions and political dynamics that help explain women’s participation in specific armed resistance movements (e.g., Coulter 2009; Hamilton 2007; Kampwirth 2002; Viterna 2013). An emerging body of quantitative research has also sought to systematically assess the impact of organizational characteristics and the features of the conflict environment on the likelihood that armed groups employ women in combat roles (e.g., Henshaw 2017; Thomas and Bond 2015; Wood and Thomas 2017). Despite the important findings generated by these studies, many questions regarding both the decisions of armed groups to accept women into their ranks and the decisions of the women who pursue these opportunities remain unanswered.
In this book, I have chosen to address questions related to women’s participation in armed conflict primarily from the standpoint of the leaders that recruit them. In so doing, my intention has been to help clarify the conditions under which rebel movements are more or less likely to extend combat roles to women and to put forth a generalizable argument that accounts for the wide variation in the prevalence of female fighters across contemporary armed rebellions. In addition, I have attempted to offer some initial insight into the potential strategic implications of this decision for the groups that employ women combatants. In this concluding chapter, I first review the main empirical findings from the previous chapters and then offer a small number of important caveats and qualifications to the preceding arguments and findings. I include this brief discussion because I believe it is important to clearly explicate the scope of the findings and to highlight not only the ways in which they shed light on the questions at hand but also note the aspects of the question that remain unaddressed or underaddressed. Finally, I offer a few brief comments on the theoretical implications of the arguments, note several potentially fruitful related areas of future inquiry, and briefly discuss a few of the relevant policy implications of the findings.
Major Findings
As I discussed in the introduction and at various other points throughout the book, men (and masculinity) have historically been associated with violence and warfare, and women (and femininity) have traditionally been associated with innocence, virtue, and peace. The strength of these associations varies both nationally and by specific community. However, the wartime division of labor, in which men fight to defend the country (or community) and women represent both the cause for which men risk their lives as well as their reward for doing so, is present across diverse cultures and persists overt time. During periods of violent armed conflict, men therefore often face intense social pressures to conform to traditional masculine roles and participate in combat, while women are discouraged from undertaking such activities and are instead expected to perform more traditionally feminine roles such as providing care, support, and encouragement to male fighters.
One of the implications of these embedded norms and attitudes is that the presence of armed young women represents a striking deviation from the historical norm. While female fighters are more common among rebel, insurgent, terrorist, and other armed resistance movements compared to state militaries, they remain a small proportion of the total number of combatants in virtually all contemporary conflicts. Nonetheless, there exists substantial variation across armed resistance movements in terms of the roles women play and the proportion of female combatants in their ranks. The MFDC in Senegal and ASG in the Philippines have, for example, never employed women in combat, and appear to have few if any formal female members at all. PIJ in Palestine/Israel has recruited very small numbers of women to serve as suicide bombers but has largely excluded them from other military roles. The PFLP, another Palestinian organization, also employed only a small number of female combatants, and it typically only utilized them in terror operations such as airline hijackings, sabotage, and assassinations. Yet, many women were included among their formal members, including many who actively participated in the group’s armed wing in noncombat support roles. By contrast, female fighters made up a substantial portion of the combat forces of the FMLN in El Salvador, TPLF in Ethiopia, LTTE in Sri Lanka, and the RUF in Sierra Leone. In each of these rebel groups, women participated in both noncombat and combat roles, and some women (albeit only a small number) attained leadership positions.
What explains this variation? Why do some movements completely exclude women from the battlefield or relegate the small numbers of women they recruit to background and support roles, while others integrate large numbers of female fighters into their armed wings? These represent the motivating questions for this project and the primary questions addressed in chapter 1. In order to answer these questions, I adopted a framework that focused on demand-side factors in rebel resource mobilization. Using this approach, I identified the severity of the resource demands imposed on rebel movements and their sensitivity to the perceived costs associated with the mobilization of women for war as two important explanatory factors in determining the presence and prevalence of female combatants in an armed group. In brief, I argued that rising resource demands, such as those that occur during periods of rapid conflict escalation and the inability to locate sufficient numbers of male volunteers, create strong incentives for the leadership to adopt new recruitment strategies. Along with forcible recruitment and child soldiers, the recruitment of female combatants represents one of several alternative mobilization strategies available to rebel leaders. All else being equal, rising resource demands increase the prevalence of female combatants in an armed movement.
However, as I argued, all is not equal across rebel groups. Whether or not rebel leaders elect to incorporate women into their fighting forces when they face such demands depends on their ideological orientation and, relatedly, the beliefs and norms of the constituent communities on which the group relies for support. While rebel groups espousing nonreligious ideologies become increasingly likely to recruit female combatants as conflict costs increase, fundamentalist and orthodox religious movements are comparatively less susceptible to these pressures. Rather, they experience countervailing pressures that disincentivize the use of female combatants as a means of ameliorating acute resource demand. Even as resource demands mount, leaders of rebellions espousing fundamentalist or orthodox religious ideologies generally refrain from recruiting female combatants. And even when they do elect to recruit women, they are likely to do so only in small numbers and to deploy them in only very limited roles (e.g., as suicide bombers). These arguments imply that for many rebel groups, the decision to recruit female combatants is a strategic one. Rebel leaders typically recruit women in large numbers and deploy them in combat roles not because of any deep commitment to gender equality, but because they believe that this strategy will improve their ability to achieve their goals, or at least promote the group’s survival. Left-wing ideology and gender egalitarian beliefs serve as moderating factors in this decision.
The recognition that female recruitment is often a strategic decision prompts the discussion in chapter 2. Therein, I considered the strategic implications of the decision to recruit female fighters. I made two main arguments in that chapter. First, I argued that the use of female fighters ultimately helps rebel groups ameliorate their human resource constraints and increases the size of their combat forces, which is often the impetus for their recruitment. Second, I argued that the visible presence of female fighters strategically benefits the group by drawing attention to its cause and by improving domestic and external audiences’ attitudes toward the group. Moreover, I argued that highlighting women’s participation in the movement represents one strategy though which rebel groups can increase their likelihood of attracting support from transnational solidarity networks and diaspora communities.
I began the empirical investigation of these hypotheses with a set of case illustrations. While these vignettes do not represent explicit tests of the hypotheses, they nonetheless demonstrate the validity of the central arguments. Closer scrutiny of the PKK and its allied militias in Turkey and Syria, the LTTE in Sri Lanka, and ZANLA and ZIPRA in Zimbabwe illustrates the relationship between the rising resource pressures generated from the intensification of the conflict and leaders’ efforts to recruit women and incorporate them into the groups’ fighting forces. In each case, the prevalence of female combatants increased as the conflict intensified; moreover, the available evidence suggested that the leaderships’ made their decisions to expand (or initiate) women’s recruitment during periods of rapidly rising conflict intensity and sharply rising resource demands.
The case illustrations also highlight the roles that group ideology played in the evolution of women’s participation. As an avowedly Marxist movement, the PKK was minimally constrained by the prevailing social norms of the conservative Kurdish society on which it relied for support. Nonetheless, there appeared to be a coevolution in the group’s rhetoric of gender egalitarianism and their efforts to recruit female combatants. This suggests the possibility that the increase in gender egalitarian rhetoric was at least partly instrumental. The recruitment of women into the LTTE followed a somewhat similar trajectory, though the group’s adherence to prevailing social values was initially comparatively stronger and the extent of its change was more dramatic. While the LTTE did not embrace Marxist ideology the group’s use of gender egalitarian rhetoric increased as it sought to bring more women into the movement and when it faced increasing demands for troops. Similarly, while lacking any deep commitment to Marxism, both ZANLA and ZIPRA espoused a nominally socialist political platform. Both also employed the language of women’s rights and emancipation in their rhetoric. However, there is some evidence that this decision was driven as much by strategic interests as by ideological commitment, and while they eventually deployed women in combat roles, this decision appeared to come later than in the other movements, and only after a steep escalation in the intensity of the conflict.
Chapter 3 also illustrates the manner in which each rebel group—and sometimes their allies abroad—attempted to highlight women’s participation as a part of their propaganda and recruitment efforts. The PKK’s leadership recognized the recruitment benefits of female fighters; however, there is little evidence that they used female combatants in their international propaganda efforts until recent decades. Since the late 2000s, the PKK and sympathetic transnational organizations have explicitly highlighted the high prevalence of female combatants in its ranks to garner attention and sympathy for the group and its cause. By contrast, the LTTE recognized the benefits associated with drawing attention to women’s participation in the violence quite early. It produced numerous videos and publications that showcased female cadres’ dedication and sacrifices in the conflict. The role of female fighters in the propaganda efforts of ZANLA and ZIPRA is somewhat less clear. Nonetheless, it appears that both groups (particularly ZANLA) intentionally highlighted women’s roles as fighters and their inclusion in leadership positions (even if modest in reality) to establish their legitimacy and attract external support during the later stages of the conflict.
Chapters 4 and 5 were devoted to empirically examining the hypotheses drawn from the previous chapters. In chapter 4, I examined the empirical implications of the theory presented in chapter 1. The statistical results provide robust support for the arguments that resource demands and group ideology jointly influence the prevalence of female combatants in an armed group. Moreover, I found evidence that the general relationship between rising resource demands and the decision to recruit female combatants is conditioned by the group’s ideological orientation. While increasing resource demands result in an increase in female combatants among rebel groups with nonreligious ideologies, such demands have no discernible impact on the likelihood that groups espousing religious ideologies recruit female combatants. In other words, orthodox and fundamentalist rebel groups persist in excluding female combatants even as conflict costs mount and recruitment become more difficult.
The results of various quantitative analyses—using both observational and experimental data—presented in chapter 5 provide empirical support for the arguments presented in chapter 2. First, they suggest that rebel groups that decide to recruit female combatants ultimately field larger combat forces than those that exclude female combatants or recruit them in only very small numbers. Second, results from a survey experiment provide some evidence, albeit preliminary, that the visible presence of female combatants in an armed group can positively influence observer impressions of the movement and its goals. In the experiment, respondents expressed more positive sentiments toward a hypothetical rebel group and its goals when they were informed that the group included female combatants in its ranks and were provided an image that subtly but clearly highlighted their presence. The substantive impact of this effect was modest, but the result nonetheless suggests that awareness of women’s inclusion as fighters within an armed resistance movement can subtly shape the opinions of outside observers toward the group and the conflict. Lastly, I find support for the claim that rebel groups that include female fighters are more likely to receive support from transnational nonstate actors such as diaspora communities and international solidarity networks.
Caveats, Conditions, and Extensions
The arguments presented in this book as well as the empirical results help identify the conditions under which female combatants are more or less likely to emerge during armed internal conflicts and the ways in which groups capitalize on their presence for strategic gains. However, these findings should not be interpreted as the definitive explanation of female combatant recruitment. Nor are they intended as a complete accounting of the ways in which female combatants influence the groups for whom they fight or the way these groups interact with other actors in their strategic environment. While I identify two important general factors that shape rebel leaders’ decisions to create opportunities for women, it is important to recognize the limitations of these arguments and the roles that additional factors might play in determining or conditioning rebel groups’ decisions to utilize female combatants.
First, local conditions likely moderate the relationships articulated in this book. I address only one such factor here, and I do so only indirectly. Specifically, I assume that the constituent community’s commitment to traditional gender norms and hierarchies is likely to influence rebel leaders’ willingness to incorporate large numbers of women into the organization. I further assume that a group’s ideology determines its perceptions of the potential costs generated by transgressing these norms, including any backlash from this constituency. While acknowledging the role of local norms in conditioning rebel decision-making with respect to the use of female fighters, the argument does not fully account for these important dynamics. Understanding the interaction between a rebel group’s willingness to recruit female combatants and the underlying social constraints embedded in the local environment requires examining specific cases where the effects of local economic, social, and political factors can be theorized in a more nuanced manner. The arguments presented here should therefore be viewed as a starting point for understanding the ways in which rebel leaders balance the (often) countervailing demands of resource pressures and constituency attitudes—what I term “the female recruitment dilemma.”
Second, in constructing the primary arguments put forth in this book, I prioritize the decision-making of the leadership over the decision calculi of individual recruits. These arguments therefore pay only limited attention to the factors that influence women’s decisions to join armed groups. Women do not constitute a homogenous or monolithic group, and different subgroups within the female population are likely to respond to different recruitment stimuli. Only a handful of previous studies have systematically examined patterns of recruitment within the female population or the diverse factors that motivate or deter women from joining armed groups when the opportunity arises. Consequently, there is little understanding of why some women readily choose to join armed groups when the option is made available, while other women remain uninvolved even when they support the group’s social or political goals.
The scant existing research in this area suggests that factors such as prior experience with political activism, the presence of network ties to the organization, presence in refugee camps, and personal biographical characteristics (especially having children) influence women’s decisions to engage in high-risk collective action, including joining an armed rebellion (e.g., Viterna 2006, 2013; Parkinson 2013). The nature of the theoretical framework and data used in this study effectively prohibit any deeper investigation of the factors that incentivize women (as a group) or specific subgroups within the female population to support or join a rebel movement. In other words, not only can we infer little about the role of supply in determining the prevalence of female combatants in an organization, we cannot make valid inferences about the conditions that shape the supply in the first place. Additional research is needed in this area.
Third, I do not presume that the presence or absence of female combatants in an armed movement is the pivotal factor determining whether or not a group receives support from domestic or foreign actors or the level of sympathy it garners from foreign or domestic audiences. That would simply be naïve. The presence of female fighters is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for acquiring such support. Rather, strategic, ideological, and logistical factors are likely to have the greatest influence on this decision. Nonetheless, as I discussed in chapter 2, by shaping audience beliefs about the movement and its goals, the presence of female fighters can exert a nominal influence on the odds that the group receives external support. The gender composition of a rebel group is simply one characteristic of a movement, but it is a potentially influential characteristic that previous studies have largely ignored.
Moreover, as with the motivation to recruit female combatants, a number of factors are likely to condition the relationship between female combatants and external support. Particularly, the gendered beliefs and attitudes of the audiences to which the group broadcasts its appeals for support likely influence whether and to what extent the visible presence of female fighters improves observers’ opinions of the group and its goals. I made a general claim informed by the existing literature regarding gendered imagery and war that images of armed young women risking their lives for a political movement “tugs on the heartstrings” of observers and helps legitimize the group. However, it is possible that the same image might offend some audiences and ultimately delegitimize the group. A supplementary analysis presented in chapter 5 provides some evidence for this contention by showing that the benefits of female combatants in garnering external support extend only to secular rebel groups. Future analyses that investigate the role of female fighters in rebel propaganda and recruitment efforts should carefully consider how assumptions about these groups’ intended audiences and their values lead rebel movements to construct their propaganda messages, particularly with respect to female combatants and other gendered aspects of conflict.
Theoretical Implications
The findings in this book have a number of potential implications for existing areas of research in political violence and conflict processes. First, these findings should have clear implications for research related to the duration and outcome of civil conflicts. A central argument put forth in the book is that rebel groups turn to the mobilization and deployment of female combatants in order to stave off defeat as the conflict intensifies and resource pressures mount. I also argue that, on average, this strategy is successful, and rebel groups that recruit female combatants tend to mobilize larger combat forces than those that do not. Moreover, while I do not assume that the effort to secure foreign support motivates female recruitment, I do find evidence that the presence of female combatants can assist groups in achieving this objective. As noted in chapter 2, previous studies generally suggest that groups that can more effectively mobilize resources are less likely to suffer defeat and are more likely to achieve their goals. To the extent that incorporating female combatants into a group’s fighting force both ameliorates resource demands and (subsequently) increases the odds that it can secure support from foreign actors, the presence of female combatants may ultimately influence the duration of the conflict and the likelihood that the group achieves its goals.
These findings may also help inform the future construction of theories on rebel resource mobilization and recruitment more broadly. As discussed in chapter 1, rebels choose among a variety of different resource mobilization strategies (forcible recruitment, child soldiers, female combatants, foreign fighters, and so on). Each strategy carries with it different potential benefits and different potential complications and costs. In addition, these strategies are not mutually exclusive, and rebels have the option of simultaneously combining multiple mobilization strategies or substituting one strategy for another over time if they choose. Scholars have typically studied these strategies in isolation; however, a more general theory about how rebels select their resource mobilization strategies would represent a major advancement. The arguments presented in chapter 1 might help propel such an endeavor. The supply-demand model of rebel recruitment has now been applied to a variety of mobilization strategies, including foreign fighters (Hegghammer 2013), child soldiering (Achvarina and Reich 2006; Andvig and Gates 2010), forcible recruitment (Eck 2014), and female combatants (Thomas and Bond 2015; Wood and Thomas 2017). Future analyses could refine this basic model in order to better understand how rebel leaders choose among these available strategies or the conditions under which they use them as substitutes or complements for one another. Such a theory likely requires more detailed consideration of the intervening variables and mitigating circumstances that facilitate or constrain the use of these strategies.
The observation that women are often willing to mobilize to support rebel movements when they are provided with an opportunity represents another potential implication for theories of rebel resource mobilization. Most existing theories of popular mobilization for armed conflict implicitly assume that the population of interest is male. This gendered assumption may therefore shape scholars’ assessment of the mechanisms through which political entrepreneurs successfully solve the collective action problem or their appraisal of the effectiveness of various resource mobilization strategies. We might reasonably infer that women, like men, weigh the costs and benefits associated with high-risk collective action and make a decision based on the balance of those factors. Yet, is it reasonable to assume that men and women endure similar costs for joining rebellions? Do they perceive the same rewards from participation? If they do, then existing theories are sufficiently generalizable. If we can assume that these costs and rewards differ but that men constitute the entirety of the population of interest, existing theories still suffice. Yet, if neither assumption holds—implying that there are gender-specific cost and reward functions and that women represent a substantial part of the population rebel leaders wish to mobilize—then existing theories could be improved by accounting for these facts.
The role of ideology as a mobilization force is perhaps instructive. Ideological commitment has long been viewed as an important factor in recruitment and mobilization (e.g., Gates 2002; Weinstein 2007). Yet, similar ideological convictions might lead to different decisions by men and women. For example, while both devout men and women committed to orthodox religious ideologies are likely to support the goals of armed groups that share their convictions, male and female responses to offers of recruitment by such groups are likely to substantially differ. As Reed Wood and Jakana Thomas (2017) assert, while small numbers of women who embrace orthodox religious ideologies are willing to transgress social and religious norms to serve as combatants, the majority of these women are likely to view direct participation in organized violence as anathema to their beliefs about women’s appropriate roles in society. As such, they are likely to locate other avenues through which to help the group advance its goals, including providing comfort and encouragement to male fighters, instilling their ideology in their children, and fund-raising and propagandizing for the group. Additional research into the factors that shape the supply of female recruits is essential to developing a more complete theory of women’s participation in armed resistance movements.
The arguments and results in this book also have direct and indirect policy implications. First, increased recognition of the scope of women’s participation in armed conflict, both as active combatants and in support roles, can hopefully increase policymakers’ awareness of women’s presence and contribute to larger and more focused efforts to reintegrate women combatants and women associated with armed groups into postconflict societies. Efforts to address the needs of these women have increased in recent decades. However, the international community often underestimates or overlooks women’s participation, and relatively few DDR processes contain specific provisions for female combatants. Of particular concern, in many cases only frontline combatants (or those who possessed weapons) are included in such programs. Yet, as highlighted in this book, women’s participation in combat is often situation dependent, and many female combatants only participate in combat on an as-needed basis. Similarly, rebel commanders often quickly transition women out of the group’s combat forces as the conflict de-escalates. Women who participated in warfare may therefore be excluded from the DDR process, inhibiting their ability to successfully reintegrate into society and creating long-lasting negative psychological and social repercussions. Women who participated in conflict often face substantial challenges to reintegration due to both the psychological trauma of war and the lingering social stigma associated with violating traditional norms by taking up arms (see Bouta, Ferks, and Bannon 2005; El-Bushra 2003; McKay 2004). They are, for example, less likely to marry and less likely to re-engage with their prewar networks. They also often face greater economic vulnerability and experience higher rates of domestic abuse than women who did not participate in armed conflict.
Finally, by illuminating the potential role that female combatants play in assisting rebel groups in mobilizing domestic and international support, the arguments and findings presented herein should be of use to policymakers seeking to understand how rebel groups interact with local communities, the sources and mechanisms of their support, and for strategies to curtail or suppress rebel recruitment. However, the recognition that women make substantial contributions to armed groups, and that those contributions may have significant effects on the conflict, might also generate externalities that further negatively impact women in conflict environments. Wartime counterinsurgency efforts often reflect a gendered understanding of political violence. Particularly, while state forces often brutalize women, young males are disproportionately targeted for violence in repressive counterinsurgency campaigns. Increased attention to the role of female combatants could ultimately contribute to an increase in the use of repression against the female population. Policymakers and human rights advocates might therefore need to pay particular attention to these dynamics in conflicts that involve large numbers of female fighters.