Militarized reproduction: Women's work and civil war

This project aims to broaden understanding of war and postwar experiences by exploring the role of women’s gendered labour and participation in underwriting, restricting or legitimizing rebel governance and civil wars.

What would we learn about rebel governance and civil wars if we included women and took their labour, participation and experience of wars seriously? Much literature in rebel governance and civil wars are implicitly as well as explicitly gendered, privileging male experiences and knowledge (Arjona, Kasfir, and Mampilly 2015; Brenner 2019).

A vast body of work is concerned with the tactics and strategies employed by rebel groups and non-state actors (De La Calle and Sánchez-Cuenca 2015; Sonin, Wilson, and Wright 2017; Cunningham and Loyle 2021), while the discipline of rebel governance itself often assumes rebel states and their governance projects as the referent object and focus for analysis (Mampilly and Stewart 2020; Huang 2016). Indeed, often the only actors included in analysis of rebel governance are military groups, institutional actors, states, and possibly (male) soldiers (Soysa 2002).

Uneven theoretical and empirical attention restrict our understanding of how wars are fought, laboured, and lived through, and obscures the gendered everyday relations shaping not only involvement in wars but also post-war experiences. This project therefore aims to broaden understanding of war and postwar experiences by exploring the role of women’s gendered labour and participation in underwriting, restricting or legitimizing rebel governance and civil wars. It will do so by tracing women’s gendered work in and experience of rebel groups across different empirical settings.