Female fighters in armed conflict
Introduction
Béatrice Hendrich
Beyond the androcentric narrative: What this book is about
This is a book about women who join armed conflicts. While their participation is not always as combatants on the battlefront, they are clearly members of an armed organization, serving outside the administrative or medical barracks, trained in the use of certain weapons – even if only for the sake of self-defense – and deployed in conflict areas.
The persons presented in this book as women identify as female; or at least they do not oppose being identified as female. As such, the book does not explicitly inquire about the experiences of queer soldiers or the national conscription rules toward transpersons. Our focus is on female persons in armed organizations, on their self-positioning and experiences, and routines and practices in a field that is connoted as masculine, and in which women still count as “the other” (Kümmel, 2006), as the minority and exception, no matter how long the history of women in armed battles, how fast the number of deployed women recently has been increasing, how rapid the change of deployment rules has been throughout the last decades or that many national forces feel pushed to reconsider gender diversity in their employment policies. This approach may be criticized for promoting the idea of a world consisting of cis persons, of “‘properly’ gendered bodies … crucial to our imagining and doing of war” (Welland, 2018, p. 132). While we acknowledge that engaging with armed women (and men) necessitates critically addressing femininities (and masculinities), we focus in this very volume on one aspect in the area of gender in war and violence.
The book considers women’s participation in armed fighting a historical given, notwithstanding highly different percentages or forms of deployment and military duties throughout history and in different world regions. The book is not in doubt that women are mentally, intellectually and physically able to command and exert violence, to think in categories of “enemy and ally”, and that some of them believe in the necessity of armed combat – (albeit not always in) the same way men do. To acknowledge women’s participation in acts of violence does not at all clash with the reality of women being endangered by male violence worldwide in a gender specific and massive way. Nevertheless, it allows a differentiated understanding of women’s reality. It makes it possible to develop new perspectives on the social and cultural circumstances and power relations that shape women’s lives, and to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003326359-1
apply Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality (1989) to the analysis of all these aspects.
Moreover, if the presence of women in various instances of armed conflicts is a given; silencing their presence renders it impossible to speak about the concrete circumstances of their participation, deployment or armed self-defense. Female fighters are exposed to additional forms of threat and danger in conflict zones that need to be addressed, not silenced, academically and politically. Unfit equipment and pathetic sanitary conditions are among the many problems experienced by servicewomen. Instead of pondering on the unfit female body, the focus should be geared toward solving the issue of unfit equipment and addressing physical needs.1
Another issue is the long-standing “hesitation” to deploy women in combat roles, which produces curious results: In the British Armed Forces, for instance, women had been included in combat situations without being allowed to carry a weapon until 1981 (Goldman, 1982, p. 6). In other instances, the weapon as a status symbol can be denied to women: Cases are known from non-state armies or rebel groups where young people and women are used in lower non-soldier status, with bad or no equipment at all, for allegedly minor duties, which are nevertheless life-threatening. This observation is in line with Laura Sjoberg’s argument that “gender often constitutes what counts as security and what does not” (2016, p. 53).
This book is about women participating in armed conflict, as members of an armed group, trained in military action, at varying positions and with different tasks within the conflict. The armed groups in question here differ in their organizational degree, power and status. There are national armed forces as well as paramilitary units, and non-state armed opposition groups (NSAGs; Mazurana, 2013). The book does not aim to discuss the differences between state violence and other forms of military violence, or between soldiers and terrorists. This is partly due to the challenges of defining terrorism and separating it from other forms of organized armed violence. Arguing from a historical perspective, which is indeed the approach of several chapters in this volume, not a small number of insurgents, rebels and terrorists are known to constitute the core of the later national forces, after the success of the insurgency, thereby dislocating the distinction between soldiers and terrorists. What is even more important in the frame of this volume is that we did not want to observe women’s activities through a normative or moral lens, since this approach would obstruct our real goal, which is listening to women and their stories. It is, however, within the scope of academic freedom, and justified by the key topic of each chapter, that some of the contributors discuss certain violent acts as terrorism, particularly in the case of suicide bombing.
The chapters included in this volume are based on fundamental insights of feminist research and gender studies, and are also indebted to the burgeoning literature on women and gender in international relations and security studies. Feminist research ethics is a shared and indispensable ground for the chapters. This applies to both the contributions from social and political sciences and the historically oriented ones. Some main aspects of feminist research ethics, such as the empowerment of the research participants or reciprocity between the researcher and the participants (Kingston, 2020, p. 533), are, however, not applicable to the analysis of
historical documents or only in an intermediate form. Nevertheless, self-reflection, deconstruction of power relations and avoidance of reproducing inequalities and (implicit) hierarchies (Leprince and Steer, 2021, p. 11) are also necessary qualities of any feminist research in the humanities. Ultimately, the authors in this volume all believe that rigid categorizations and dichotomic thinking are dangerous; they not only fail to enrich our understanding of the world but also silence and obscure the complex diversity and relationality that we set out to analyze.
Cynthia Enloe’s legacy in feminist security studies (FSS) is fundamental here for two reasons: She not only compelled us to ask “Where are the women?” during our preparatory online sessions, but she also emphasized the significance of “feminist curiosity”, which allowed us to critically inquire personal certainties about the gender aspects of armed combat and armed forces, and broaden the disciplinary horizon by taking our own research projects further. This was done in some cases by relocating soldiering women from the margins of the research into the center, in others by focusing on the beginning of a story instead of the end; the question of how and why women happen to join armed activities instead of describing the disarmament and reintegration process. We also endeavored not only to broaden but to transcend disciplinary restrictions toward a feminist transdisciplinary approach, in the sense of “opening towards a reflexive transgression of artificially imposed boundaries” and “consistently and repeatedly leave our disciplinary comfort zones and go into unfamiliar knowledge fields” (Hughes, 2020, p. 2). We do not claim to have realized this goal in toto, but one could argue that for feminist transdisciplinarity, the journey is the goal.
In addition to these early classics of Enloe or Yuval-Davis (Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989; Yuval-Davis, 1997), the recent generation of in-depth studies has inspired, supported and facilitated the process of reading, listening and interpreting what we came across in our documents and in the field. There is now a sound basis of theoretical work that explores the relation between gender and security from different angles, including the regional differentiation of FSS (Leprince and Steer, 2021; Stern and Towns, 2022), soldiering and citizenship (Lomsky-Feder and Sasson-Levy, 2017) and women’s violence (Gentry and Sjoberg, 2015). There are also comprehensive works such as Women and War by Carol Cohn (2013a) and the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Security (Gentry, Shepherd and Sjoberg, 2018).
Two subfields among the more recent publications were particularly helpful: The first is the growing number of empirical case studies on the gendered experiences of women during their participation in the armed forces or during the postwar reintegration process (Gentry, Shepherd and Sjoberg, 2018; Harel-Shalev and Daphna-Tekoah, 2020; Katto, 2020; Hlatky, 2022). The second includes studies on different aspects of security that do not focus on gender issues as their main subject but include the gender dimension of the issue under investigation in an organic manner (Ware, 2012; Hutchinson, 2018; Hagemann, 2019; Varma, 2020).
In hindsight, the book chapters should have discussed more explicitly the broad issue of embodiment (Narozhna, 2022); the militarization and mutilation of the (masculine) body (Sünbüloğlu, 2018); or the enactment of embodied experiences
in art, literature and mass media (Baker, 2020). That being said, an integration of narrative approaches and embodiment (Heavey, 2015), both experienced and narrated, has been implemented in this volume in Chapter 7 by Ayelet Harel on Israeli women soldiers in frontline war rooms, and in Chapter 5 by Hue Nguyen Thi and Eva Fuhrmann about female warriors in Vietnam.
Listening to their voices
A crucial interest in all chapters collected in this volume was to make women’s own voices heard. This endeavor comes with a variety of challenges; some of the challenges are discipline-specific, some are the result of the specific circumstances in security studies. For historians, for example, discovering the untold stories of women having joined an armed fight and/or military violence is still a novelty. A fundamental reason for this belatedness in research is the dominance of male “experts” both in general historiography and in military history (Hagemann, 2017, p. 180). Women’s experiences, voices and memories are considered part of the private sphere, while men constitute the public, and the public constitutes male historiographers’ key interest (Hagemann, 2019). This purposeful negligence of the presence of women in historical armed conflict is obviously not related to historical and social reality, as its continuation in male narratives on more current conflicts, particularly in patriarchal societies, such as in Bosnia (Smeulers and Simić, 2019) or India (Basu, 1991; Patel, 2022), demonstrates. Furthermore, as part of feminist reflexive empowering practice, the contributors have sought ways to make women’s voices heard in an authentic way. In the case of field studies, qualitative interviews seem to be a suitable tool to ensure this. However, in security studies, qualitative studies have their limits: Due to the peculiar circumstances of research in this field, many approaches are difficult, if not impossible, to apply. In his chapter on Boko Haram female fighters (Chapter 10), Aimé Raoul Sumo Tayo, for instance, mentions the challenge of talking about women “who do not use speech as their primary mode of expression” (Ashby, 2011) in a context where stories about them often define them. There are only a handful of studies that can build on such an extended sample of 100 interviews as that of Harel-Shalev and Daphna-Tekoah (2020).
Research in security is also confronted with challenges regarding security sensitivity. Security sensitivity is all encompassing: It covers the researcher, interview partners and their surroundings, and handling the collected data (Gurol and Wetterich, 2021, p. 109). Therefore, it might be impossible, harmful or ethically unacceptable to interview women during an ongoing underground activity, a related engagement with an armed troop or even after their deployment. Another problem with interviews is the lack of any pristine authenticity; the interview as well as the interview partners are part of a setting that is formed by power relations and only decipherable in its context. In a (post)colonial research environment, it is almost impossible to eliminate asymmetric power relations from the qualitative research process. Kate Coddington (2017) suggests replacing the interview with other forms of engaging with relevant persons, for example, participating in activists’ meetings,
5 and reading all sorts of written documents much more intensely. These are not only egodocuments and artistic works produced by persons of interest, but also all kinds of interviews and videos, including third-party productions such as newspaper articles or parliamentary debates and court documents (Strange, 2010; Lafi, 2018). By means of collecting and comparing as many different texts as possible, careful reading and historical and political contextualizing, women’s voices and narratives can be retrieved against all historiographical odds (Purvis, 1992).
Soldiers, combatants, fighters: Why “war” is still a more complex battle zone for women than for men
The individual chapters in this volume differ in their regional and historical references. Likewise, women’s motives for joining the struggle and their experiences during this struggle are of quite different natures. One of the common features, however, is that women’s participation in the armed struggle is a significantly more complex field than that of men’s. This applies to women’s rank in the military hierarchy, their tasks, the evaluation of their activity by the military and civilian environment and the assessment of whether they perform “genuine” soldierly or military tasks at all, or whether they provide simple support services. Women’s participation in armed struggle is not taken for granted; moreover, they are under much stronger pressure to justify themselves. When women volunteer for service in the armed state forces, they are asked why they do it at all. When women, for social and economic reasons or under threat of violence, are forced into a fight, which then in retrospect is interpreted as immoral by the victorious side or the majority society, the contempt for women is significantly greater than for the male combatants (Mazurana, 2013, p. 151). These different aspects are used in a way that reinforce and justify each other. In a way, it means that because women are unfit for real – i.e., manly – duties; if they want to join, they have to do the less glorious tasks and be content with that. As a result, women are on average deployed in positions of markedly lower status. These are by no means only “female activities” such as nursing, office work and making coffee (Yuval-Davis, 1997, p. 101, cited in Sjoberg and Via, 2010, p. 82). Rather, these are potentially high-risk tasks, such as safehouse keeping, espionage, ammunition transport or reconnaissance in the field.2
Due to fewer career opportunities, which are often already predetermined by law through maximum quotas and restrictions on certain positions, women in regular armies earn less and benefit less from retirement pensions or financial care that would be their due for post-traumatic stress disorder or bodily traumatization. In historical cases where women joined informal insurgent troops that were included in the emerging state forces after the victory, such as the Vietnamese Youth Shock Brigade or the Turkish nationalists during their War of Liberation (1919–1922), the women were excluded or had to campaign for financial support in their old age, because they were not considered to have been regular soldiers. In cases where women serve in higher positions, tokenism sets in. Their visibility as an exception to the rule rises overproportionally, “resulting in strong pressure for performance
excellence … and polarization of gender differences, which encourages behavior that adheres to gendered stereotyping” (Lomsky-Feder and Sasson-Levy, 2017, p. 144).
So, women’s tasks and positions in warfare and insurgence are numerous but often underrated, unpaid and located somewhere between or beyond the usual ranks and carrier paths. The Female Engagement Teams and Cultural Support Teams, active in international military missions, are a telling example of how to increase the number of female soldiers in regular armies without de facto integrating them into established male units.3 In the same vein, it is almost impossible to delineate the physical space within which women fighters’ activities take place. While the front line is usually conceived of as men’s space, women are deployed in spaces that appear to be located at a (safe) distance from the war zone; in ambiguous spaces such as a safe house or the territory occupied by the enemy (as a spy); a war room, at the supportive infrastructure in the rear; or at the home front, in civil defense and paramilitary activities. This observation clearly corresponds to the feminist perspective on war that contests and refutes the existence of “a clear location and a distinct beginning and end” of war (Cohn, 2013b, p. 21).
The issue of naming female fighters is likewise no small feat. The definition of “combatant” is indeed a frequently discussed matter in the literature. Moreover, even though the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions have endeavored to define a combatant clearly and comprehensively, it is often the fighting parties who decide in the final analysis whom to call a combatant. According to the convention, a combatant is someone who is authorized to use force in a violent conflict “under a clear chain of responsible command” (Medecins sans frontieres, n.d.). Denying the status of combatant of a person means denying the right to be treated as a prisoner of war (POW) in case of captivity. Combatants and POWs, respectively, cannot be prosecuted for their execution of violent orders, and they enjoy certain rights during imprisonment. Denying this status leads, in effect, to uncontrolled forms of punishment against everyone who is identified as having exercised violence as a noncombatant, and this affects civilians in self-defense more often than not (Medecins sans frontieres, n.d.). The cases of female soldiers of the Red Army during the Second World War in Olesia Isaiuk’s chapter (Chapter 6), and of the female members of the IS-affiliated Boko Haram in Cameroon in Sumo Tayo’s chapter (Chapter 10), exemplify how and why female warriors are more likely to be denied the legal safeguards of combatant status.
There is, however, a second aspect in the definition of the combatant that should be taken into consideration. Hlatky (2022) traces how armed state forces themselves have been trying to exclude women from what they define as combat positions for a long time, based on the presumption that women are mentally and bodily unfit. Not recognizing women’s contributions, Hlatky maintains, eventually turned into “hypocrisy” (p. 31) when the US was at war in Kuwait and Iraq where “women who were deployed faced no less risk than their male counterparts but were not recognized for their contributions or eligible for combat medals because they were technically barred from combat roles” (pp. 31–32). Harel’s chapter (Chapter 7) provides an example of the increasing blurring of “the line between combat and
non-combat” (Hlatky, 2022, p. 32) due to the increasing technicalization and digitalization of warfare. The Israeli female soldiers serving in war rooms in proximity to the war zone challenge the definition of combatant as well as of war space. It is remarkable that women have access to NSAGs more easily than to state forces.4 The organizations’ rhetoric about why they include (or reject) women, is manifold. A very common aspiration, as often adopted by politically left leaning revolutionary groups, is to achieve the desired social equality even during the struggle. Publicly shaming men who have yet to join in the struggle (or who have been considered not to be fighting wholeheartedly) may also be a reason for women’s demonstrative participation. This perspective is also held by women themselves, as Britt Ziolkowski’s chapter on Palestinian female suicide bombers reveals (Chapter 9). Beyond the rhetoric, pragmatic reasons exist, such as the existence of tasks that should be explicitly performed by women or the lack of male combatants. Women’s ways into an NSAG are also diverse: Ranging from being violently forced to passionately supporting the cause (Loken and Matfess, 2017). Just as entry into an NSAG is more flexible than into a state army, the division of non-combat and combat tasks is less cemented and more adapted to current needs (Mazurana, 2013, p. 150). From a gender studies perspective, female fighters always come with an extra benefit for the organization: They ideologically solidify the cause (national unity or revolutionary equality), they strengthen the bond between the organization and the civil population (Dirlik, 2018), they hand down the message to the next generation (their children) and under certain occasions they can trick the other side because they are not perceived as fighters or terrorists.5
Finally, the chapters in this volume present several instances where, for the women, the armed fight has come to an end or not started yet, but it is (still) a dominant part of their everyday lives, of body and mind. Evidently, wars do not start with the shooting of the first bullet, nor do they end with the declaration of ceasefire (Cohn, 2013b, p. 22). This can be traced in the establishment of an encompassing system of militarizing the society of Turkey between the World Wars (as discussed in Chapter 3 by Béatrice Hendrich), the continuation of the fight by Ukrainian warriors during their imprisonment in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, or women’s social and economic living conditions when they are back in civil society after their armed fight, as explored in several chapters of the volume.
Beyond the Eurocentric narrative
When we planned this book, we intended to include contributors from a variety of countries and diverse academic backgrounds, so that we could widen the geographical range of the case studies; discover in what ways specific historical, political and social contexts motivated women to participate in armed organizations; and provide an inclusive approach on FSS. This ambition was based on the awareness of the generally inadequate inclusion of the Global South in (feminist) security studies and international relations, both in terms of the location of research institutions and scholars, and in terms of the appropriate consideration of issues and perspectives emanating from the Global South. In security studies,
which “derives its core categories and assumptions about world politics from a particular understanding of European experience” (Barkawi and Laffey, 2006, p. 330), a decentered perspective is still the exception, not the norm. It is even argued that the absence of the Global South is not an unintended byproduct of “Western-Centrism” but a “constitutive practice” (Bilgin, 2010) in security studies. It appears that from its beginning, the relatively young discipline of FSS has been aware of the shortcomings and distortions of both White security studies and White feminism. However, being aware of a challenge does not necessarily lead to overcoming the same, as Katerina Krulišová and Míla O’Sullivan (2022) show in their outline of FSS’s short history: the high ethical and thematic standards that the discipline sets for itself include a consequent anti-imperialist stance, awareness of the significant achievements of (women’s) movements and activists especially in the Global South, and a focus on “lived experience, positionality, reflexivity, and emancipation of marginalized subjects” (p. 35). At the same time, internationally visible research is still produced at established research institutions in the Global North (Krulišová and O’Sullivan, 2022, p. 36). As Krulišová and O’Sullivan also demonstrate, the academic periphery includes European geographies such as “CEE, South-eastern and Southern Europe” (p. 36), and, one could add, all the borderlands with strong intellectual ties with Europe, despite their continual othering by Europe, such as Ukraine and Turkey.6 In recent years, the number of specific case studies related to the Global South and comparative works has increased considerably (Asaad and Hasanat, 2022; Steenberg, 2022; Katto, 2020). This can be considered a major step toward an inclusive research area, but there remains inexorably a dependence on publishing criteria and rules of academic writing created by the center (Kloß, 2017), and a substantial need for material resources facilitating an exchange of academics and activists from different parts of the world on equal footing.
When we prepared the book, we were confronted with all sorts of COVID restrictions but also with a rapidly emerging “digital turn” in academic conversations. Taking advantage of these circumstances, we circulated a call for papers and “met” with everyone interested in the topic during multiple but short online meetings. This provided the opportunity to include discussants and contributors from a variety of countries. Throughout the process, as always happens, tentative contributors withdrew. While some informed us about their reasons for withdrawal – often related to difficulties because of the pandemic – others just disappeared. We had the experience that it was more difficult to continue communication with people located at research institutions in the Global South. Relying on earlier experiences in global cooperations, we, the core group from Cologne, had the impression that their teaching load and the demands of their employers, but also differing modes of academic communication reduced their motivation to stay with us. A positive example of successful cooperation is Chapter 5 by Hue Nguyen Thi (Vietnam National University, Hanoi) and Eva Fuhrmann (University of Cologne) on female participation in the Vietnamese military from the 1940s to the present. To sum it up, an open call for papers and digital communication means are not enough for “more balanced relationships in the global system of knowledge production” (Kloß, 2017, p. 13), and it
will take persistence and doggedness before the easily stated “internationalization approach” of academia in the Global North turns into productive reality.
So, while the topics treated in this collected volume are located on four continents, the academic background of the contributors is still, to a significant degree, shaped by European academia. Yet, we endeavored to decenter Europe, to question the homogenizing national perspective on war and peace, to display how warrelated and war-justifying discourses travel at an accelerating speed in a globalized world, and how personal and political networks connect world regions beyond the colonial divide. At the same time, the chapters present seemingly similar phenomena that are not necessarily the result of similar circumstances.
Some contributions in this volume explicitly tackle a “fluidity between supposedly separate scales” (Al-Bulushi, Ghosh and Grewal, 2022, p. 2) such as Global South/North or different religious communities; for example, the chapters about women of color in the armed forces of Germany (Gashi and Hendrich, Chapter 8), or women from a variety of countries including Germany and Finland joining the Islamic State in the Philippines (Chin, Chapter 11). Yet those chapters with a focus on a specific country also mirror cultural, economic and political interconnectedness between regions more or less far from each other, as a result of colonial continuities and “neo-colonial globalization” (El Habbouch, 2019, p. 3).
Richard Herzog’s contribution on the Lakshmibai (Chapter 2), a female ruler during the British colonial rule in South Asia, illustrates the significance of one historical exemplar figure for early anti-colonial insurgents, various Indian nationalist agendas and for the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, which was established in 1943 as part of the Indian National Army, and was composed of volunteering women from Malayan rubber estates.
Postcolonial states share the experience of a war of independence with the countries in the eastern Mediterranean, in this case, Turkey and Israel, even if the political and historical context of these countries is decidedly different. The impact of a war of independence on women’s lives is a telling case in point, since it provides both universal and specific aspects. The assessment of an armed struggle against external enemies as a progressive, liberating and thus justified act has turned into an integral part of the national founding DNA in many different countries from the North as well as the Global South. In those countries, it constitutes an almost insurmountable hindrance to the activities of feminist pacifists. On the other hand, it is often argued that there exist fundamentally different feminist perspectives on warfare in postcolonial countries, almost irreconcilable with the perspectives of feminists from the North. One argument is that the convergence of African women’s fight for equality with their anti-colonial fight (Oluwaniyi, 2019, p. 5) is completely missing from the European feminist experience. Another argument is that for “women in the Euro-American sphere, access to combat has been read as claiming equal citizenship with men”, while for “women in the Global South, their claim to combat has often prioritized national self-determination for the colonized people” (Magadla, 2021, p. 27).
Countries that are not so unambiguously located on the colonial world map are often out of sight of postcolonial studies.7 The chapter “Fighting for peace, fighting
for the country?” (Hendrich, Chapter 3) illustrates the ambiguity in which feminists of Turkey found themselves in the 1930s when, on the one hand, they declared solidarity with the women of the colonized countries and their call for independence and armed resistance, and, on the other hand, they invoked the “Western model”, according to which military service was an element on the way to civic equality. Likewise, the broad range of women who fought wars not strictly anti-colonial but still aiming at overcoming an oppressive rule, such as civil wars or the anti-Fascist resistance in Europe, or women who consider themselves a part of the international anti-imperialist war against the very state whose citizenship they hold, is missing from the discussion. The Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), based in the USA, is an eminent example of this globalizing perception of armed female resistance (Gosse, 2005). The TWWA conceived of women’s fight as self-defense:
Whereas the struggle for liberation must be borne equally by all members of an oppressed people, we declare that third world women have the right and responsibility to bear arms. Women should be fully trained and educated in the martial arts as well as in the political arena. Furthermore, we recognize that it is our duty to defend all oppressed peoples. (Third World Women’s Alliance, 20 December 1971)
Decentering Europe is a requirement in FSS as much as it is inescapable to avoid any essentialization of the “women of the Global South” and to take account of “the multiple manifestations of subaltern subjectivities” (Souza, 2019, p. 9). A new level of digital post-spatiality adds to the complexity of the Global South as a “subversive perspective” (Kloß, 2017) and a “normative conceptualization” (Demir, 2017, p. 55). The twisted and multispatial biographies of women supporting and fighting for local and global organizing powers such as the Islamic State, cannot be adequately analyzed without using an approach that includes all those aspects.
The structure of the book
The book consists of three parts. The chapters are, however, not arranged according to their geographical references or along a timeline but according to common key topics and structural approaches. The first part, titled “The historical perspective: Changing perceptions, repeating patterns?”, includes chapters that scrutinize change and continuity over an extended time span. Richard Herzog’s chapter (Chapter 2) on the female ruler of Jhansi, Lakshmibai, traces the cultural and political reception of a woman in an unexpected position. After the death of her husband, the Maharaja of Jhansi in northern India, she declared herself to be his heir and became one of the leaders and emblematic figures of the massive uprising against British colonial rule in South Asia of 1857. She died while actively involved in armed battles. In the following decades, she turned into a legendary figure for the Indian independence movement, Indian nationalism and related literary production. The “Rani of Jhansi Brigade”, established in 1943 as a regiment of the insurgent Indian National Army, was one of the few all-female combat units
of the Second World War. The example of the Jhansi Brigade also strengthens our claim that women’s armed fight or female units have a strong tendency to be organized from the beginning as a symbolic exception to the rule, with peculiar and unclear rules and duties, independent from the women soldiers’ perspective and the danger of their activities. The Jhansi Brigade was trained but never participated in active combat. While the effect of such a brigade’s existence on Indian women’s self-esteem is mostly positively rated, it can also be argued that the political gain it has offered to its creator, the second president of the Indian National Congress, Subhas Chandra Bose, is higher than what it has done for the women who remain politically underrepresented to this day.
In Chapter 3, titled “Fighting for peace, fighting for the country?”, Béatrice Hendrich analyzes Turkey’s public discourse on women’s soldiering in the 1930s. In the second decade of the Turkish Republic, the War of Liberation had already turned into a blueprint for militarizing the whole society, including girls and women, covering all parts of life from formal education to pastime activities. Women’s inclusion was presented in relation to the already established meta-narrative of the poor but brave Anatolian women who contributed to the War of Liberation by carrying ammunition to the field, or, in rare cases, by actively participating in armed combat. Meanwhile, the influential all-male politicians and militaries of the time were eager to keep the women outside this last stronghold of masculine homosociality, the armed forces, even after educational institutions and the parliament had already opened their gates for females. Allowing girls into the organization for gliding and parachuting, the Turkish Bird; establishing military preparatory school classes for girls; and neighborhood courses on civil defense, particularly for women, were meant to reconcile differing expectations. Unlike in other countries, the Second World War did not lead to the official inclusion of women in the armed forces of Turkey.
Women’s participation in (post)colonial insurgent and state forces, their historical background and political context are treated in Barbara Potthast’s chapter as well as that of Eva Fuhrmann and Hue Nguyen Thi. Potthast (Chapter 4) focuses on women as agents in armed conflicts in Latin America over the last two centuries. Until the mid-20th century, female participants were variously characterized as providers, camp followers or as idealistic supporters, while during the second half of the 20th century, the figure of the female guerrilla fighter became prominent. Their use of arms was evident, but they were still idealized and characterized by “female” attributes, such as beauty and sacrifice, albeit in service of a political cause. Regarding women and violence in armed conflicts, Potthast poses some fundamental questions in her chapter, such as the motivations for participation in various ways and the conflicts with traditional roles, as well as questions concerning intergroup gender relations, public discourses and memories about these women, especially in post-conflict societies. She argues that a long-term perspective can shed light on persistent structures and problems as well as changes in gender roles.
Hue Nguyen Thi and Eva Fuhrmann’s chapter (Chapter 5) investigates the (dis) continuities of female participation in the Vietnamese military from the 1940s to the present. Based on a critical analysis of public discourses related to women and war, both today and in the past, and drawing on narrative interviews with female
veterans, the chapter outlines and compares the place of women in NSAGs as well as in today’s state forces. During the fight for independence, from 1945 to 1975, women in all parts of the country took up arms to join the fight. Numerous female fighters who lost their lives during the war became national heroines. Today, there is no formal law that prevents women from joining military or security forces; on the contrary, women are encouraged to contribute to the nation’s defense and security. While being constructed as courageous and brave defenders of the nation, women are simultaneously depicted as the caretakers of the family. The chapter also provides a precise background of the Vietnamese state with its institutions such as the Vietnamese People’s Army, the Communist Party and the Vietnamese Women’s Union, all of which closely cooperate to produce and control the roles women can assume inside and outside the army.
The second part of the volume, titled “Case studies 1: Women in national armed forces”, focuses on the service within and for state forces, looking closely at a variety of physical places and political expectations that altogether constitute this wide space of serving the nation. Chapter 6, by Olesia Isaiuk, is on Ukrainian women who were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. This study sheds light on a group of female fighters neglected by political memory, historiography and academic research, similar to the Jhansi Brigade. Before imprisonment, these women had been participating either in underground activities in the frame of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, led by Stepan Bandera, or in officially recognized armed forces such as the Red Army of the USSR. While the structure of the Red Army and the Banderites (named after Bandera) was completely different, and the women’s training and tasks had different focuses, both groups considered themselves fighting for an already existing, legally recognized state under occupation. In the concentration camps, they not only shared the same experiences but also shared the contention that imprisonment was an integral part of their fight, and that the fight had to continue, even in a modified way, during captivity. According to Isaiuk, the women endeavored to reorganize themselves inside the camp and to support the weaker inmates. Additionally, they considered survival as a necessary task that would allow them to continue their armed fight after imprisonment.
Ayelet Harel’s chapter (Chapter 7) presents a special case of inclusion and exclusion from the front lines, of being noncombatant but in proximity to combat at the same time, using the example of Israeli female soldiers serving in war rooms. In the past decade, female soldiers assigned to strategic war rooms have become significant participants in war; with some of them running and commanding the war rooms. Because of both their locatedness (Susan Bordo) and professional capacity, they challenge the traditional concepts of security, war and gender roles. The use of various visual devices, which bring images of war into the war room, affects how the women in there both “experience” and “make” war. Even though they are not physically present on the battlefield itself, this has not stopped them from being exposed to extreme violence. In Isaiuk’s chapter, protection is carried out toward other women and children by the imprisoned female soldiers as a part of the military masculine role model the female soldiers attune themselves to once they acquire the status of a combat soldier. The Israeli combat-support soldier in the strategic war
room, according to Harel, protects both the state and the soldiers in the battle zone, while at the same time being protected by the combatants. While the diversifying of military tasks may question the understanding of gendered roles in the military, this doubt, as formulated by Orna Sasson-Levy (2002, p. 357), that whether this development will ever “undermine[s] the hegemonic order” of masculinity, remains.
Chapter 8, “Women of color in the armed forces of Germany”, by Egzona Gashi and Béatrice Hendrich, discusses the consequences of intersectionality in the German Federal Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr, with a focus on migrant German women and women of color serving within the Bundeswehr in different positions. The guiding question is how these women experience their military service and how they make sense of themselves in this core institution of the nation-state and “hyper-masculine organization” (Lomsky-Feder and Sasson-Levy, 2017, p. 1). The study shows that discrimination based on religion, ethnicity and gender often overlap and multiply in the case of women of color, who are often of Muslim creed given Germany’s immigration history. The chapter outlines the recent history of changes both in German citizenship law and in regulations regarding conscription and serving in the armed forces since these changes constitute the backdrop of the topic. Intersectionality, German nationalism and racism, citizenship, and the significance of (a precarious) language form the theoretical framework of the discussion. The empirical part of the analysis is based on two original qualitative interviews as well as on further published material such as videos, interviews and semiautobiographical books. The research process itself showed that the German case remained hitherto untouched by the academia, while similar cases such as the situation of female soldiers of color in the US Army have been substantially researched and written about.
The third part of the book, titled “Case studies 2: The gender of sacrifice and agency”, looks at female members of organizations located in the field of political Islam. The presentation of these three chapters, by Britt Ziolkowski, Aimé Raoul Sumo Tayo and Charlotte Mei Yee Chin, respectively, by no means intends to suggest that there is a special form of violence just because these organizations are all Islamic. Instead, they are connected to each other by certain elements that illustrate the main questions of this volume remarkably well. To begin with, the participation of women in armed violence by organizations that promote a most binary and patriarchal worldview, seems to challenge established concepts of gender and security. Second, the deployment of female suicide bombers is not a new phenomenon. It can be argued that male-made propaganda finds more and more rhetorical devices to justify women’s participation. Third, the effort to include women is often stipulated by ideological concerns, a lack of “manpower” and the hope to mobilize hesitating men. Fourth, (inter)national security institutions have realized quite late that women can commit “such things”. Indeed, the Western conception of Muslim women as being essentially passive caters to this perception. Finally, participation in such extremely violent organizations as Boko Haram, for example, brings to the fore, once again, questions related to our understanding of agency and military sacrifice: How are supposedly “female” forms of sacrifice – for the family, but also for the extended family in form of the nation – and men’s soldierly sacrifice of
dying during a battle connected to each other? Do we have to discuss the matter of agency in joining an armed group or perpetrating violence separately in each case, or does participating in an organization based on order and obeying constitute a loss of agency in any case?
Ziolkowski’s chapter (Chapter 9) focuses on the self-portrayal of Palestinian female suicide bombers during the Second Intifada. It examines the written testaments and visual documents of three women who carried out their acts with the support of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. The visual documents in particular underline the possibility of reading martyrdom as the ultimate fulfillment of patriarchal motherhood, while shattering the myth of the peaceful woman at the same time.
Sumo Tayo (Chapter 10) provides a rare case of research based on original interviews with female former jihadists, Cameroonian army officers and former Boko Haram captives, prominent counterinsurgency actors, and eight former suicide bombers arrested before or during the attacks. The author discusses the weaponization of female bodies by Boko Haram, cosmetic feminization in the context of a military phallocracy, and the mobilization of women by Boko Haram in the hypermale combat role as well as in intelligence and support activities. The reasons for women’s participation in armed conflicts, he concludes, cannot be reduced to one single idea like victimhood.
Finally, in Chapter 11, Chin highlights the continuing significance of the Islamic State (or Daesh) in the Philippines as well as women’s increasing relevance in these groups. Her chapter analyzes dependencies of radicalized women in jihadist groups there and focuses on the social context from which women “depart” in order to join these groups. To this end, she gives an overview of the historical and political background of the Philippines, illustrates the roles and functions of female jihadis, and shows how the intersection of multiple oppressed identities enforces marginalization and vulnerability resulting in the radicalization of women. Based on her holistic understanding of the initial conditions of radicalization, she concludes that contrary to radicalization theories, which focus mainly on ameliorating socioeconomic conditions of the individual, group narratives facilitating radicalization processes must additionally be addressed.
A distinctly important motivation for presenting this book was undoubtedly the authors’ desire to address and scrutinize their own view of gender in violent conflicts within a transnational exchange among colleagues. Our exchange was realized in the form of repeated online meetings, since the COVID pandemic had forced us to try new ways of academic cooperation. However, while the pandemic made us revise our hesitation toward exclusively online meetings, the next crisis undermined many certainties about pacifism and armed fighting in Western Europe: the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. From a Western European perspective, doing research on war and peace has acquired a different quality since then. The chapters included in this volume are both the result of individual research and of the online meetings. The hope is that we can feed additional knowledge and perspectives, as well as productive questions, into the field of feminist international relations and security studies.
Notes
1 A NATO report from 2021 criticizes both the lack of appropriate equipment and of adapted healthcare (vaginal and urinary tract infections are common, menstrual cycle symptoms are not addressed, pregnancy is just regarded as a “mishap”) and demands explicitly “to mainstream the inclusion of female research subjects” in future research projects (Braithwaite and Lim, 2021, pp. 48, 58, 75).
2 It seems that the categorization of “traditional male” and “female” tasks in the field should be discussed further. Taarnala (2016) also includes not only cooking and caring but also intelligence in the noncombatant female area. Cohn, however, underlines the importance of “male care” for a successful combat (2013b, p. 23).
3 “The term itself [cultural support team] took sex out of the equation; however, the teams still solely comprised female Servicemembers” (Katt, 2014, p. 109).
4 Quantitative data is provided by Wood and Thomas (2017); Mazurana (2013)
5 The deployment of (allegedly pregnant) women in violent action, and the blindness of the hegemonic institutions toward women’s sheer ability to exert violence has a long history. One wonders if this arrangement, which is only successful in a world of totally gendered perception and prejudice, will now come to end. After all, the (inter)national institutions have started to understand that “IS brides” are not victims that should be rescued and sent home without any interrogation.
6 Catherine Baker (2021) shows how the population of former Yugoslavia is categorized as non-White and to which extent this arbitrary categorization is related to practices of securitization.
7 For a case in point, see Fatma Müge Göçek’s “Parameters of a postcolonial sociology of the Ottoman Empire” (2013).
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