Women And The Politics Of Military Confrontation

As the crisis in Israel does not show any signs of abating this remarkable collection, edited by an Israeli and a Palestinian scholar and with contributions by Palestinian and Israeli women, offers a vivid and harrowing picture of the conflict and of its impact on daily life, especially as it affects women's experiences that differ significantly from those of men. The (auto)biographical narratives in this volume focus on some of the most disturbing effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a sense of dislocation that goes well beyond the geographical meaning of the word; it involves social, cultural, national and gender dislocation, including alienation from one's own home, family, community, and society. The accounts become even more poignant if seen against the backdrop of the roots of the conflict, the real or imaginary construct of a state to save and shelter particularly European Jews from the horrors of Nazism in parallel to the other side of the coin: Israel as a settler-colonial state responsible for the displacement of the Palestinian nation. Nahla Abdo is Professor of Sociology at Carleton University, Ottawa. She has published extensively on women and the state in the Middle East with special focus on Palestinian women. She contributed to the establishment of the Women's Studies Institute at Birzeit University and has found the Gender Research Unit at the Women's Empowerment Project/Gaza Community Mental Health Program in Gaza. Ronit Lentin was born in Haifa prior to the establishment of the State of Israel and has lived in Ireland since 1969. She is a well known writer of fiction and non-fiction books and is course co-ordinator of the MPhil in Ethnic Studies at the Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin. She has published extensively on the genedered link between Israel and the Shoah, feminist research methodologies, Israeli and Palestinian women's peace activism, gender and racism in Ireland.

This book directly challenges the stereotype that women are inherently peaceable by examining female combatants’ involvement in ethno-national conflicts. Drawing upon empirical case studies of Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland, this study explores the ways in which women have traditionally been depicted. Whereas women have predominantly been seen as victims of conflict, this book acknowledges the reality of women as active combatants. Indeed, female soldiers/irregulars are features of most modern conflicts, and particularly in ethno-nationalist violence – until now largely ignored by mainstream scholarship. Original interview material from the author’s extensive fieldwork addresses why, and how, some women choose to become violently engaged in nationalist conflicts. It also highlights the personal / political costs and benefits incurred by such women. This book provides a valuable insight into female combatants, and is a significant contribution to the literature. This book will be of great interest to students of political violence, ethnic conflict, gender studies and international relations in general.

Simona Sharoni’s innovative approach to the conflict in the Middle East stresses the relationship between gender and politics by illuminating the daily experiences of women in Israel and in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Among the issues explored are the connections between the violence of the conflict and the escalation of violence against women; the link between militarism and sexism; and the role of nationalism in building individual and collective identities. Sharoni also shows the impact of Intifada (the Palestinian uprising in December, 1987) on the Palestinian and Israeli women’s movements. While women’s coalitions such as these are critical subjects in and of themselves, the actions of marginalized women are rarely, if ever, given serious treatment in the study of international relations. With this book, Sharoni creates an aperture for the emergence of new perspectives and alternative methods in the development of a new vision in global politics and gender equality. The interdisciplinary scope of the book will make it valuable to scholars of political science, women’s studies, conflict resolution, and Middle East studies.

Twenty-three countries currently allow women to serve in front-line combat positions and others with a high likelihood of direct enemy contact. This book examines how these decisions did or did not evolve in 47 countries. This timely and fascinating book explores how different countries have determined to allow women in the military to take on combat roles—whether out of a need for personnel, a desire for the military to reflect the values of the society, or the opinion that women improve military effectiveness—or, in contrast, have disallowed such a move on behalf of the state. In addition, many countries have insurgent or dissident factions, in that have led armed resistance to state authority in which women have been present, requiring national militaries and peacekeepers to engage them, incorporate them, or disarm and deradicalize them. This country-by country analysis of the role of women in conflicts includes insightful essays on such countries as Afghanistan, China, Germany, Iraq, Israel, Russia, and the United States. Each essay provides important background information to help readers to understand the cultural and political contexts in which women have been integrated into their countries' militaries, have engaged in combat during the course of conflict, and have come to positions of political power that affect military decisions.

From Pakistan to Chechnya, Sri Lanka to Canada, pioneering women are taking their places in formal and informal military structures previously reserved for, and assumed appropriate only for men. Women have fought in wars, either as women or covertly dressed as men, throughout the history of warfare, but only recently have they been allowed to join state militaries, insurgent groups, and terrorist organizations in unprecedented numbers. This begs the question - how useful are traditional gendered categories in understanding the dynamics of war and conflict? And why are our stories of gender roles in war typically so narrow? Who benefits from them? In this illuminating book, Laura Sjoberg explores how gender matters in war-making and war-fighting today. Drawing on a rich range of examples from conflicts around the world, she shows that both women and men play many more diverse roles in wars than either media or scholarly accounts convey. Gender, she argues, can be found at every turn in the practice of war; it is crucial to understanding not only ‘what war is’, but equally how it is caused, fought and experienced. With end of chapter questions for discussion and guides to further reading, this book provides the perfect introduction for students keen to understand the multi-faceted role of gender in warfare. Gender, War and Conflict will challenge and change the way we think about war and conflict in the modern world.

The Political Economy of Conflict and Violence against Women shows how political, economic, social and ideological processes intersect to shape conflict related gender-based violence against women. Through feminist interrogations of the politics of economies, struggles for political power and the gender order, this collection reveals how sexual orders and regimes are linked to spaces of production. Crucially it argues that these spaces are themselves firmly anchored in overlapping patriarchies which are sustained and reproduced during and after war through violence that is physical as well as structural. Through an analysis of legal regimes and structures of social arrangements, this book frames militarization as a political economic dynamic, developing a radical critique of liberal peace building and peace making that does not challenge patriarchy, or modes of production and accumulation.

This book explores women’s militant activities in insurgent wars and seeks to understand what women ‘do’ in wars. In International Relations, inter-state conflict, anti-state armed insurgency and armed militancy are essentially seen as wars where collective violence (against civilians and security forces) is used to achieve political objectives. Extending the notion of war as ‘politics of injury' to the armed militancy in Indian administered Kashmir and the Tamil armed insurgency in Sri Lanka, this book explores how women participate in militant wars, and how that politics not only shapes the gendered understandings of women’s identities and bodies but is in turn shaped by them. The case studies discussed in the book offer new comparative insight into two different and most prevalent forms of insurgent wars today: religio-political and ethno-nationalist. Empirical analyses of women’s roles in the Sri Lankan Tamil militant group, the LTTE and the logistical, ideological support women provide to militant groups active in Indian administered Kashmir suggest that these insurgent wars have their own gender dynamics in recruitment and operational strategies. Thus, Women and Militant Wars provides an excellent insight into the gender politics of these insurgencies and women’s roles and experiences within them. This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of critical war and security studies, feminist international relations, gender studies, terrorism and political violence, South Asia studies and IR in general.

This book stems from a simple ‘feminist curiosity’ that can be succinctly summed up into a single question: what happens to combatant women after the war? Based on in-depth interviews with 40 research participants, mostly former combatants within the Irish Republican Army (IRA), this book offers a critical exploration of republican women and conflict transition in the North of Ireland. Drawing on the feminist theory of a continuum of violence, this book finds that the dichotomous separation of war and peace within conventional approaches represents a gendered fiction. Despite undertaking wartime roles that were empowering, agentic, and subversive, this book finds that the ‘post-conflict moment’ as experienced by female combatants represents not peace and security, but a continuity of gender discrimination, violence, injustice, and insecurity. The experiences and perspectives contained in this book challenge the discursive deployment of terms such as post-conflict, peace, and security, and moreover, shed light on the many forms of post-war activism undertaken by combatant women in pursuit of peace, equality, and security. The book represents an important intervention in the field of gender, political violence, and peace, and more specifically, female combatants and conflict transition. It is analytically significant in its exploration of the ways in which gender operates within non-state military movements emerging from conflict, and will be of interest to students and scholars alike.