Women's everyday labour crucial to rebel warfare in Myanmar

In her book Reproducing Revolution, Jenny Hedström explores how women’s everyday work– caring for children, maintaining homes and farms, and serving as combatants – underpins the continuation of rebel warfare in northern Myanmar.

The book is based on over a decade of ethnographic research among Kachin rebels in northern Myanmar, where women play a central yet often invisible role in the struggle for autonomy and rights. Through close collaboration with women’s groups, Jenny Hedström shows how care work – including raising children, managing households and agriculture, taking up arms, and marrying into so-called “revolutionary marriages” – is fundamental to the survival of the rebellion.

Highlighting women’s experiences

“I wanted to understand why the war continues, how these groups manage to endure. There were analyses of soldiers, the drug trade, and ethnicity, but the experiences of women were missing,” says Jenny Hedström.

The book introduces the concept of militarised social reproduction to highlight how care work not only sustains military resistance but also shapes the practices and endurance of warfare itself.

“The experiences of women taught me a great deal about rebel warfare—how it is shaped and sustained through the daily labour women perform both within and beyond the home. Although often invisible or dismissed as unimportant, this work is critical to the military effort,” says Hedström.

A Focus on Lived Experiences of War

She argues that the research contributes to a deeper understanding of how war is actually lived and felt – and the impact it has across generations.

“I often read studies that, more or less, ‘sanitise’ war by focusing on numbers and statistics instead of the people living through it – or that romanticise war. But war is dirty and broken, and it affects lives far from the frontlines, long after the conflict ends. And this is precisely where women’s roles and responsibilities in rebuilding and strengthening relationships, bodies, and lives become central,” she says.