Marks 2017, Gender Dynamics in Rebel Groups

CHAPTER 27

Gender Dynamics in Rebel Groups Zoe Marks

As noted at the outset of this handbook, research on the gendered dynamics of armed conflict has seen tremendous growth in the past two decades. This chapter focuses on the type of conflicts most prevalent in our current political system – intra-state wars – and examines gender dynamics within the rebel and insurgent organizations waging them. Since 1990, intra-state and sub-state armed conflicts have been the most common category of war, with very few violent contests between formal state militaries (Pettersson and Wallensteen 2015). Many of these conflicts are asymmetrical, ‘unconventional’ wars – an amalgamation of civil wars, secessionist conflicts, inter-communal violence, and internationalized intra-state conflicts – that feature a diverse array of armed actors who often target civilians, overrun state borders, and cultivate war economies of drugs, minerals, and other lootable commodities (Kalyvas 2001; Straus 2012). Non-state armed groups constitute a broad category that includes private military contractors, paramilitaries, civil defense forces, and more; however, this chapter focuses more narrowly on rebel and insurgent groups (Krause and Milliken 2009). Rebels and insurgents use organized violence to directly contest state legitimacy by attempting to overthrow the government, secede, or otherwise replace the existing sovereign structure.

They are thus inherently destructive entities, in that they seek to dismantle existing power structures and usually engage state militaries and paramilitaries to do so. Yet, they are also constructive and creative actors that generate new political and military organizations, systems, and modes of control (Arjona et al. 2015). In order to survive shifting military and political environments, insurgent organizations tend to be more nimble and dynamic than state militaries, which have deeply institutionalized formal and informal practices.

Z. Marks (*) University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: zoe.marks@ed.ac.uk © The Author(s) 2017 R. Woodward, C. Duncanson (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51677-0_27

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Rebel groups are led by violent entrepreneurs with heterogeneous ideologies, who combine persuasion and coercion to recruit supporters and fighters (Eck 2014; Weinstein 2005). Because most rebel groups lack guaranteed sponsorship – a privilege enjoyed by state militaries – they have to source their own material and supplies in the midst of conflict (Hazen 2013; Jackson 2010). As a result, they are more likely than state militaries to use guerrilla tactics and rely on local populations for support (Weinstein 2006; Wickham-Crowley 1992). All the while, they must recruit, train, and maintain a cadre of members for an organization that has been newly established to challenge the power of the very state in which they operate. Such material and organizational dynamics throw into sharp relief the importance of gender in shaping violence, cohesion, and survival in war.

Exploring the internal dynamics of insurgency through gender reframes familiar debates on women in the military, sexual violence in armed conflict, and the emancipatory potential of mobilization for war. We know women play a prominent – if under-recognized – role in armed conflict; we also know that local and cross-cultural gender norms deeply affect the ways men and women contribute to and experience war-making (Carpenter 2016; Moser and Clark 2001; Wood 2006). Yet, for all of the strides in research on female combatants and gendered violence, the gender policies and internal dynamics of non-state armed groups themselves remain relatively uncharted territory. Examining how roles, responsibilities, and social relations are distributed and negotiated between men and women in rebel groups can help us better understand how these organizations survive and function, and also in turn, help us more fully understand the spectrum of men’s and women’s experiences in wartime.

Some of the gender norms shaping recruitment, training, and role distribution among rebel leaders and followers are ubiquitous across military settings, regardless of group type. For example, as is the case with state militaries, power structures are deeply patriarchal; rebel leaders and decision-makers tend to be male, as do most frontline fighters (Carreiras 2006; Mazurana 2012). Women are often delegated key logistical and support tasks that are instrumental in sustaining the group, but rarely attract media attention (Enloe 2000). In order to delve deeper into the particularities of gender and rebellion, this chapter looks first at cross-national comparative data on gendered participation patterns in rebellion. I then examine organization-level dynamics to understand how insurgent groups structure power and seek to improve cohesion by managing gender relations, from allocating roles to asserting social control. The third section goes into sub-group analysis to explore variations in individual experiences of violence and vulnerability.

Throughout the chapter I emphasize women’s experiences because they have been systematically obscured and under-represented in (all but feminist) research on rebellion and insurgency, and thus require greater explication than men’s roles. Where men and boys are not explicitly discussed in the chapter, they are present in the empirical data underpinning the research and implicit in the social-relational analysis. I take gender as both a positivist

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variable – for example, we can count individual men and women with respect to various roles or experiences – and as a social construct, rendered legible and meaningful through interpersonal societally performed roles and relational dynamics (Butler 1990, 1993; there remains little data on trans and non-binary experiences of civil war). This approach takes account of how gender is both embodied and enacted, enabling it to be deeply felt by individuals, as well as interpreted and imposed by other members of society.

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The observation in feminist security research that women participate in rebellion often and in large numbers is a reflection of – and rejoinder to – the crosscultural assumption that war is men’s domain. Women do indeed participate often, but not always. In a cross-national random sample of rebel groups active since 1990, Henshaw finds nearly 60 per cent of organizations had female participants (Henshaw 2016). Put another way, more than two in five rebel groups active in the past 25 years had no recorded female participation at all (Henshaw 2016). Another cross-national study examining women’s participation in Africa’s non-state armed groups since 1950 – including rebels, paramilitaries, terrorists, and self-defense militias – finds just 45 per cent of groups had female participants (Thomas and Bond 2015). Both of these cross-national datasets focus on women’s participation at the group level along two binary variables: whether women participate at all; and, if they serve in combat roles.

The data give us a strong starting point for understanding the gendered dynamics of rebellion, with two key trends emerging. First, there is enormous variation in the rate of female participation across insurgent groups, with 40 to 55 per cent of organizations reportedly not including any women. Second, despite this variation, it is indisputable that women participate in rebellion significantly more frequently than in other types of non-state armed groups.

Disaggregated by group type, rebels and insurgents – groups seeking to overthrow the government – were comparatively more likely to include women, with 52 per cent having female members (Thomas and Bond 2015). Those waging large-scale civil wars included women more than any other type of nonstate armed group, with 87 per cent having gender-mixed forces (Thomas and Bond 2015). What explains this striking variation? To begin to unpack why women’s participation varies between groups, and within groups over time, we need to understand the characteristics that make insurgent groups more likely to include women, and within that category, identify patterns in role allocation between women and men. First, though, it is worth taking stock of the reliability and limitations of cross-national data, and identifying which pieces of the puzzle are still missing.

Due to the definitional ambiguity of who is a ‘participant’ and who is a civilian in armed conflict, and the difficulty of getting accurate data on groups that derive strength from operating covertly, it is likely that women’s participation is underreported rather than over-reported. Sustaining rebellion relies on a spectrum of

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coordinated actors, ranging from frontline fighters and commanders, to collaborators facilitating recruitment and traders running supply lines at the rear. This makes estimating women’s participation particularly challenging, as they are more likely to operate in hidden camps or rebel-controlled territory and often fulfill roles that go unreported (Parkinson 2013). Sources vary in which of these participants they include, often reporting only armed fighters and not the range of ‘camp followers’ providing logistical support or occupying the domestic sphere of a rebel group (McKay and Mazurana 2004). Moreover, by shifting the definition of group membership, numbers can be deliberately inflated or depressed according to the politics of those reporting them (Thomas and Bond 2015). Who is a group ‘member’ or ‘combatant’ is not only often unclear but is contested internally (Marks 2014). Similarly, ‘civilian’ status is often gendered – attributed to women – and politicized – reserved for those the state deems worthy of protection (Carpenter 2005).

Group-level data on binary indicators are likely to be more robust for larger groups that attract media and NGO attention, perhaps by waging long conflicts, operating in more heavily populated areas, or communicating directly with their own spokespeople and propaganda (Bob 2005). Conversely, smaller rebel groups, operating in rural areas with low-level or sporadic violence and limited economic impact, may be described in less descriptive detail and their female participants may thus go unreported. For example, the National Democratic Front of Bodoland, a separatist movement founded in 1986 and now with several factions but only about 1500 members, has no reported female participation but has survived for 30 years with many troops basing in their home villages along the India–Bhutan border (Henshaw 2016). It is difficult to imagine they have not had significant ancillary participation from women, even if they have been excluded from formal membership in the fractious organization. Moreover, some groups are simply coded differently in different datasets, such as the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement/ Army (SPLM/A), which is reported by Bond and Thomas as having ‘extensive women’s participation’ (Thomas and Bond 2015, 504), but appears in Henshaw as having neither female participants nor female fighters (2016).

At the sub-group level, if we want to know how many women are participating, or what percentage of the group is female, numerical estimates are even harder to come by. Rebel groups have dual incentives, to conceal their true size to protect troops and maintain an intelligence advantage, and, to report inflated figures to appeal to supporters and present a seemingly more serious threat to the state. Real troop numbers also vary dramatically over time in response to strategic objectives, military pressure, territorial control, logistical supplies, and even seasonality. The SPLM/A mentioned above, for example, has been in existence since 1983 and changed shape from a reformist rebel group calling for a unified secular Sudan, to its current status as the state military of an independent South Sudan. In that time, recruitment strategies and patterns of violence have varied dramatically and while women have always been in the minority, their participation as soldiers, supporters, and civic

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leaders in the SPLM/A has also shifted with the political and military context (Pinaud 2014, 197–98).

Leaving these caveats and limitations aside, what makes groups more likely to include both male and female members? As noted above, insurgencies often have broader-based recruitment that opens the door for women, whereas state militaries and other armed groups tend to be more selective and exclusive. Rebel groups also tend to rely heavily on population support for their logistics and intelligence, which increases contact with the gender-mixed civilian population and creates a range of logistical roles and support functions women can serve.

Beyond these general patterns, and across non-state armed groups, Bond and Thomas find four further factors that increase the likelihood of women’s participation. First, organizations that adopt an explicitly gender-inclusive ideology are more likely to have female members and fighters, regardless of whether they operate in a state that includes women in its military or protects women’s rights (Thomas and Bond 2015). Second, groups using terrorist tactics are significantly more likely to include female participants, and are more likely to have women serving in combat roles, suggesting they are incorporated for tactical advantages (Thomas and Bond 2015). Third, groups utilizing forcible recruitment are up to 20 per cent more likely to include women than groups relying solely on voluntarism (Thomas and Bond 2015; Henshaw 2016). More research is required to unpack the causal relationship between forced recruitment and gender inclusivity.

The correlation may result from overcoming some of the gendered selection problems in voluntary recruitment (i.e., it is more likely to mobilize men); it may reflect desperation on the part of the group and a willingness to recruit any able-bodied participant; or, it may indicate another underlying strategic or structural dynamic affecting these groups and the types of wars they fight (Eck 2014).

Finally, larger organizations are more likely to include women than groups with less than 1,000 participants (Thomas and Bond 2015). This raises the question of whether groups first become large and then require women’s support to sustain themselves, or, if groups that actively mobilize women double their ‘recruitable’ population, thereby becoming larger.

Beyond the structural factors that make groups more or less likely to include female participants, there are a number of instrumental advantages to doing so.

Most obviously, women’s inclusion increases the recruiting base, potentially increasing troop size and allowing leaders to be more selective in assigning roles and responsibilities. Women are more likely to be overlooked and underestimated as violent actors, enabling them to serve as effective spies, messengers, bombers, and more. Women’s inclusion can enhance propaganda by demonstrating broad-based support for rebellion – ‘even the women are fighting’ – or by softening the external image of the group by adding sex appeal or a maternal veneer. In their study of women in Colombia’s Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia—Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP), the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, Herrera and Porch note that including women can make the organization appear to more overtly represent the community as a whole (2008). Their physical presence can be used to attract or

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help retain male recruits (Mokuwa et al. 2011), and their bravery or willingness to take up arms can be instrumentalized to goad violence by men.

Motivated by these and other factors – including women’s own desire to participate in military causes – the 60 per cent of organizations that do include female participants deploy them in a wide range of roles and duties. Women and girls serve as spies, informants, and intelligence officers; they operate radios, communications systems, and act as messengers; they produce, procure, and prepare food for troops; they trade, loot, and carry supplies; and they train and serve as medics and nurses (McKay and Mazurana 2004). In groups where women fight, they carry out frontline assignments, conduct minesweeping and suicide and bombing missions, and command and train fighters of all genders.

The vast majority of organizations use women to maintain the war machine, not for combat duty. When it comes to leadership and power, in rebellion as in peacetime organizations (Alvesson and Billing 2009: 4), women tend overwhelmingly to be lower ranking than men. Men, meanwhile, are less likely to provide childcare and domestic labor in armed groups; and there are few documented accounts of them being kept as sex slaves or forced into marriage, although sexual abuse of men and boys (in particular) is believed to be severely under-reported (Sivakumaran 2007).

In the rebel groups using women as fighters, most women remain unlikely to carry out missions. For example, in Boko Haram’s forest camps in Northern Nigeria, women and girls as young as seven are being trained for suicide missions, which the group has relied on them to execute in unprecedented numbers (Unicef 2016). But, despite the spike in attacks by victims forced to become weapons, the vast majority of the group’s female members remain at the rear, where, in addition to being trained militarily, their sexual and productive labor is used to sustain the insurgency and its mostly male fighting cadre (Human Rights Watch 2014b: 25–27). Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) also had high numbers of female combatants, but still, active fighters were in the minority (Cohen 2013; Coulter 2008). Leaders initially recruited and trained women and men side-by-side under a banner of gender equality, yet a few years into the conflict, commanders of the group came to believe women and girls were dying at the frontline at much higher rates than men and boys (Marks 2013a). In response, they decided to end compulsory frontline assignments for female combatants, sending women on attacks only if they asked to go.

Both Boko Haram and the RUF represent examples of enclave rebel groups, which wage their guerrilla wars from jungles, mountains, and other remote areas.

Enclave rebels are more likely than urban-based insurgencies to have a ‘society in the bush’ – a sphere of total social and political control used to sustain their military agenda. In conflicts where towns are too insecure to occupy for prolonged periods, the ‘society in the bush’ functions as a constructed rear in which male and female members provide for the group materially – with food, shelter, medical care, etc. – and serve as the social, sexual, and family support needed to make rebellion bearable for years on end. The military domestic sphere is

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particularly prominent in groups that practice abduction, forced marriage, and enslavement, as enclave camps provide space in which to secure unwilling participants. In the cross-national data, there is considerable overlap between groups that have no clear ideological platform, groups that forcibly conscript, and groups with female members. Evidence suggests that this is also a regional pattern, as the vast majority of groups with these compounding variables are based in sub-Saharan Africa, where they have waged protracted large-scale conflicts with limited resources. For example, Africa’s longest-running rebel group, Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), abducted girls and boys for decades, inducting them into the rebellion in rural camps. Gendered role allocation meant girls were often raped and forcibly ‘married’ to commanders (Baines 2014), while boys were trained to fight against their people (Vermeij 2014).

These patterns are significantly less common in urban insurgencies, where combatants can get support from the local population in situ (Staniland 2010).

Similarly, in groups with significant territorial control, fighters can travel more freely throughout controlled zones, making covert visits to their partners and families and supporting more elaborate logistical supply chains (Weinstein 2006). This may partly explain why Bond and Thomas (2015) find lower incidence of female participants in secessionist movements, compared to rebellions seeking to overthrow state power. Secessionist groups often have significant social influence, if not territorial control, over a relatively socially and politically well-defined or homogenous area, a putative ethnic ‘nation’ (Toft 2002). This may lead to increased mobility for fighters, secured supply chains, and the ability to mobilize women in support roles without having to bring them into guerrilla camps. In such cases, female participants may appear to be leading civilian lives and go unreported in membership, when in fact they are essential to the group’s political and military survival. We thus see from the qualitative comparative data that different types of armed groups rely on women and men differently. No single attribute determines female participation; rather, compounding causal factors lead to complex correlations.

GENDERED ORDERS

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The patterns of role allocation described above are a fundamental part of how organizations structure power and establish social control in the fractious and insecure context of civil war. By forming groups of hundreds or thousands of violently socialized individuals for the purpose of overthrowing dominant power structures, rebel leaders have the complicated task of maintaining strict discipline and outward focus so as to mitigate internal threats, such as coups, mutinies, or fractures in the rebellion. Most political science research suggests they do this through a simple formula of punishment and reward, incentivizing fighters with money, loot, and power; and deterring non-compliance with violence, punishment, and demotion (Weinstein 2005). However, detailed ethnographic research paints a more complex picture of how accountability, socialization, and compliance are generated in rebellion. Scholars of conflicts

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from Latin America to the Middle East, Africa to Southeast Asia, describe a dynamic social landscape in which personal affairs are woven into the political sphere of rebellion, and survival – as much as militarism – drives individual agency (Coulter 2009; Parkinson 2013; Utas 2005; Viterna 2013; Wood 2003). The most straightforward way to analyze gender dynamics amidst such layered processes is by breaking down rebellion into its component parts: first, people are mobilized; then, they are trained; power structures and command chains are used to establish control and organize behavior; and, finally, social and personal affairs are monitored and streamlined into the broader military apparatus. A rebel group able to accomplish all of these tasks, and to continue implementing them throughout the conflict, has a strong chance of survival, if not outright victory.

Insurgent mobilization has primarily been examined as a collective action problem (e.g., Gurr 1970; Lichbach 1998; Olson 1971). Researchers want to know what makes individuals willing to sacrifice time, resources, security, and potentially their lives to wage war in their own country, especially if they think others might be persuaded to take up arms instead of them. Not surprisingly, most of this research is deeply gendered – focusing on men, but not analyzed as such; Gurr even titled his seminal text, Why Men Rebel (1970). There are also prominent historical trends in the theoretical literature. During the 1960s and 1970s, when most groups were fighting wars of liberation and Marxist rebellions, political ideology was seen to be the key driver of mobilization (e.g., WickhamCrowley 1992; Reno 2011). The 1990s saw the proliferation of post-Communist rebellions promoting ethno-nationalist ideologies, and research on mobilization turned to emphasize why group identification and historical cleavages mattered (e.g., Laitin 2007; Sambanis 2001). As some of these wars dragged on, particularly those in which natural resources and primary commodities were exploited to sustain conflict for years without external support, hypotheses turned increasingly to the motivating pull of economic factors, presented variously as ‘greed’, inequality, and material and social incentives (Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Keen 2005; Fearon and Laitin 2003; Humphreys and Weinstein 2008; Mkandawire 2002; Ross 2004; Stewart 2002). For example, individuals may join rebellion to gain access to money, protection, and other selective benefits for themselves, or they may do so to improve their children’s and family’s chances of survival.

More recently, scholars have begun to explore mobilization patterns through the relationship between individuals and the group. In El Salvador, Wood identifies a range of social processes that occur or accelerate to make civil war possible, including political mobilization that lays the foundation for militarization (2008). What she describes as ‘insurgent political culture’ facilitates participation across a spectrum, from moral support to frontline fighting (Wood 2003). For female combatants in particular, Viterna identifies three divergent pathways through which women came to join El Salvador’s Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN): some were ‘politicized guerrillas’ pulled to the group; some were ‘reluctant guerrillas’ who were pushed to join; and others were ‘recruited guerrillas’, who may not have initially had a strong disposition toward

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the rebellion, but were persuaded to join (Viterna 2006). In her research on Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) mobilization and remobilization in Lebanon, Parkinson specifies further the importance of social networks in sustaining insurgencies through organizational crises: ‘the configuration of network overlap between militant hierarchies and quotidian social structures and the existence of trust-based brokers between militant subdivisions produce resilient rebel organizations’ (Parkinson 2013). It is often through everyday networks and informal connections between militants and civilians that groups can move or access information, finances, and other supplies with the dynamism and flexibility required for effective insurgency. Women, as much as men, are instrumental to these processes and bring social ties that underpin mobilization and group viability.

Once in the group, new recruits are sent to military training to be turned from civilians into fighters, and from individuals into group members. Training is remarkably consistent across armed groups. Rebels, mercenaries, and state militaries alike train their fighters in physical fitness, weapons handling, military maneuvers and tactics, command and control policies, and ideology. In many insurgent groups, training is where gender norms are broken, or reinforced. For female rebels, training is a proving ground where they have to establish themselves as equal to male fighters’ fitness and ability. Training programs and boot camps often reinforce an esprit de corps of military masculinity that helps fuel socialization for collective violence (Arkin and Dobrofsky 1978; Woodward 2000). Whether gender-mixed or all-male, military training emphasizes establishing physical and psychic separation between fighters and civilians, a social rupture that is particularly important in civil war (Janowitz 1960).

During and after training, troops are allocated to roles and units according to their skillset and the organization’s needs. Most rebel groups are organized into two wings: a military wing and a political wing (Cunningham et al. 2013). While literature on armed conflict often implicitly discusses armed groups as though they are unitary entities, in practice, groups’ political and military wings can be quite different, composed of different actors with conflicting agendas and strategies for achieving the group’s goals. Many groups also have gendersegregated military command chains that operate parallel to mainstream (male-dominated) power structures. Whether set up as auxiliary corps, special brigades, or through a dual-command system, these organizational arrangements delegate authority along gender lines. From Al-Khansaa Brigade in the Islamic State to the women’s wing of the LTTE, militant women commanders often manage female fighters’ and civilian women’s affairs, while men oversee centralized planning and men’s affairs. For example, in Sierra Leone, the women’s auxiliary corps (WACs) governed all female fighters in the RUF, and ostensibly included a female counterpart for every male commander throughout the organization. However, in practice, many positions remained unfilled for months or years on end depending on personnel capacity. A civilian affairs branch of the RUF’s military wing controlled marriages, gender-segregated housing, and women and men’s manual labor. The former, referred to as

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‘bush marriages’ or ‘marriage by arm’, helped incentivize male fighters to stay in the group and provided a social structure within which women’s domestic and logistical work could be easily organized (Coulter 2009; Marks 2013b). Yet, many militarily trained women had little respect for civilian women and girls who joined the group as porters, servants, and bush wives to male fighters (Marks 2014). According to Women’s Task Force commanders (WACs commanders appointed to run a political/judicial branch for reporting abuse), the most common complaints were not against men, but against female fighters threatening and attacking their civilian counterparts (Marks 2014). Such tensions highlight the importance of internal organizational dynamics in shaping individuals’ wartime experiences, despite broadly similar pathways to mobilization.

Social control and intra-group conflict are not unique to the RUF, though its use of forced marriage and violence sits at an extreme end of the spectrum alongside groups like the LRA, Boko Haram, and the Islamic State (Annan et al.

2011; Human Rights Watch 2014a, 2014b). Other rebellions have also utilized revolutionary marriages and sexuality to strengthen the war effort, where every relationship presents a potential security threat, intelligence leak, or political/ military opportunity. The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), often held up as a paragon of gender equitable revolution in Africa, actively recruited women and encouraged comrades to marry. Moreover, couples were told to live together for a year first, not only to ensure it was a wise partnership but also to weaken the familial ties that previously dictated marriage practices, helping cement fighters’ commitment to the revolution (Silkin 1983). Policies that bring intimate partnerships into the war zone flip the opportunity costs of joining: instead of going absent without leave to visit their spouse or partner, members lose their partner if they leave the group.

The FARC, also a Marxist guerrilla group that, like the EPLF, espouses gender equality, have implemented a different strategy in Colombia where fighters – both men and women – are ostensibly allowed to take as many lovers as they want. By formalizing open relationships, the leadership aver that all cadres are married first to la revolución and only secondarily to fulfill their physical needs (Stanski 2006). This again serves to promote genderprogressive ideals while breaking ties with more conservative, traditional family and community values. Yet, sex is tightly controlled by commanders, with terms that are unequal for men and women. Permits are required for overnight trysts and women are expected to be sexually available to desirous comrades. Further, while men can have partners outside the movement, women cannot, perhaps an effort by the leadership to minimize women’s emotional attachments under fear they could weaken their commitment to fight a multi-decade civil war (Herrera and Porch 2008).

Evidence of the FARC’s desire to prevent fighters having attachments to anything above guerrilla struggle is seen most prominently in insisting that female fighters use birth control and undergo forced abortion if they become pregnant (Herrera and Porch 2008). The organization’s strict oversight of

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sexual relationships and prohibition of motherhood reflects a desire to achieve perfect gender ‘equity’ at the frontlines, at the cost of women’s bodily autonomy and freedom of movement at the rear. The record on rebel group policies on sex, marriage, dependents, contraception, and abortion practices is riddled with gaps. However, evidence suggests that policies seeking to control women’s sexuality and reproductive potential are pervasive in rebellion – researchers simply need to look for them. Even the RUF, seen by many as paragon of dysfunction and violence against women, had a policy encouraging sex education (Marks 2013a). Motherhood was common in its ranks, but not particularly valued, with thousands of children adopted by commanders’ wives and hundreds of babies – born of rape, bush marriages, and love – delivered by nurses with limited supplies. Group’s diverse policies reflect different gender ideologies and in turn manifest varied approaches to gender equality and sexual autonomy.

UNDERSTANDING INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCES IN ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT Gender is a key mode of social identification that can determine and constrain women’s and men’s military and political potential. However, power and experiences of violence can be as varied within gender categories as between them.

Underlying the gendered governance structures described above, a pervasive divide distinguishes two forms of guerrilla femininity. Women who want to be fighters and to be treated with the same respect as men at the frontlines often have to forsake, or subjugate, their identities as mothers, girlfriends, and wives. A female fighter in the Irish Republican Army noted that in the armed side of the struggle, ‘first and foremost you were a soldier and that was it’ (Alison 2004). Femininity is often seen as subversive at the frontlines, where it is perceived as threatening male power and militarized masculinity at the individual level and within the culture of the rebellion. Women thus often have to choose between militant roles and feminized civilian or support positions. Categorical differences in assignments are highly socially salient in organizations built around the social processes of warmaking. What individuals contribute is a marker of status in its own right, and given added currency through rank and promotion. In addition to gender, a range of systematic and subjective factors affect how roles are allocated and who moves up in the organization. Ethnicity, religion, age, education, social class, physical ability, military prowess, loyalty and bravery, even attractiveness, all dramatically affect access to power and security in rebel groups. Within groups of female militants, women who are strong fighters or notorious for their ruthlessness can gain a special cachet for how they transcend gender norms. Their ability to use violence to protect themselves and build affinity with male fighters can help them carve out a more gender-equal sphere than that occupied by other women in the group (Cohen 2013). In Sri Lanka’s LTTE, for example, female fighters were seen as being more violent than the men, a reputation cultivated not only to sow fear in opponents but

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also to protect them from their male counterparts (Alison 2004). In interviews with former rebels in Sierra Leone and Liberia, both of which had several high-profile women fighters, ex-combatants repeatedly said that female fighters were ‘equal to men’ and much less subject to harassment than civilian members (Marks 2008).

Women who do not or cannot fight pursue other strategies to climb the precarious social ladder of rebellion. Regardless of varying rhetoric of gender equality or empowerment across groups, one of the surest ways women secure status and wellbeing is through attachment to a powerful man. Well-placed partnership can bring social freedom, political influence, and material benefits.

In the FARC, the wives and girlfriends of commanders enjoyed enormous social freedom. They were not subject to the same prohibitions on pregnancy and childrearing as other female fighters and could even visit their children, who they were allowed to place in the care of their families (Méndez 2012). Politically, wives of top commanders in the RUF had such status that they were included in the delegations for the peace talks, an opportunity that caused much consternation among the female Vanguard fighters (Marks 2014). Wives and girlfriends of mid-level commanders tend to have lower status, but can still exercise enormous influence in who is protected or punished in rebellion. As one former-RUF woman described it, she ‘had the power to say, “don’t humiliate this other person”’ (Marks 2014). Women with status attained through male partners can thus enjoy significant informal social and political power, as well as material benefits: warm beds, secure shelter, reliable food and supplies, new clothes, bodyguards, and other group members being appointed as their servants.

Beyond navigating intimate partnerships, power accrues to women seen as strengthening the organization. Educated and wealthy women, when not seen as a threat, are valued for their resources. In cultural settings where a premium is placed on age, older members may be more respected or protected than young recruits. Finally, many rebel groups have overt ethnic or religious affiliations and ideologies. In these settings, members of the dominant group are more prominent within the organization’s military and political wings – and outsiders may be excluded entirely. The Islamic State, for example, has violent hierarchies of victimization enshrined in its ideology, which it has used to promote the enslavement and rape of Yazidi, minority Christian, women (Human Rights Watch 2014a). At the other end of the spectrum in the same organization, highstatus women serve in the Al-Khansaa Brigade, where they are allowed to carry weapons and drive cars while policing other women’s adherence to the laws of Islam as interpreted and decreed by the group (Zakaria 2015). Even rebel groups that do not have explicitly ethno-religious policies or platforms can be affected by identity-based discord and discrimination. In the SPLA, members of minority ethnic groups faced discrimination despite leader Jonathan Garang’s commitment to equality and unity (Jok and Hutchinson 1999). These fractures cross-cut and intersect with other biases and social dynamics such that, after Garang’s death, reports of rape against women from opposing groups increased and remains an ongoing problem today (Jok 1999; OHCHR 2016). In Latin America, race and indigeneity has also affected individuals’ status and power

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within rebellion, particularly for women. Many of the FARC’s female combatants, for example, are Afro-Colombian or from indigenous communities and have mobilized as an interest group in the peace talks, lobbying for the interests of under-represented and minority women (Herrera and Porch 2008).

There are thus prominent social and cultural norms that deeply affect the gendered distribution of power inside rebellion. Some such norms precede the conflict, carrying over from peacetime, while others are newly signified modes of order and control. These social power dynamics can be as influential in determining individuals’ access to physical security and wellbeing as are formal hierarchies and command chains. The compound vulnerabilities – or unique opportunities – posed by intersections between gender and other individual traits is perhaps most pronounced within gender-segregated institutions and chains of command, where women exert direct control over other women. But, it is also prominent in seemingly gender-equitable spaces, such as at the frontlines, and in interpersonal gender relations between men and women at the rear.

CONCLUSION There is vastly more research on the gender dynamics of rebellion than there was even just ten years ago. Yet, as this chapter has demonstrated, the more we know, the more questions we need answered. The cross-national quantitative data demonstrates key structural factors that make groups more likely to include female participants. Large groups, groups that use terrorism and forced recruitment, and groups with gender equitable ideologies are all more likely to have women than groups without these characteristics. We still do not know, however, how these characteristics interact and whether they may reflect underlying mechanisms that explain increased likelihood of women’s participation in rebellion. Moreover, our available datasets are currently hamstrung in what they can measure because of the spotty documentation of women’s participation. Much more detailed data is required if we want to understand what leads women to join some groups in only small numbers and others at a rate nearly commensurate with men.

The qualitative comparative research suggests some patterns for further investigation. Namely, African rebellions use forced recruitment and forced marriage at much higher rates than is documented in other parts of the world.

They also have high rates of female participation in enclave rebellions, which wage guerrilla struggles from the relative security of remote bush camps. There are odd inconsistencies in the quantitative data, as well, particularly when read alongside findings from qualitative research. For example, African secessionist movements are less likely to have women members than high-profile nationalist secession struggles in other parts of the world, from Sri Lanka to Ireland, which have used female members to great strategic and political effect (Thomas and Bond 2015; Alison 2004). Moreover, Henshaw’s research suggests that rebel groups with ‘no known ideology’ have above-average gender inclusivity, but African women participated and fought in rebellion at the highest rates during

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the independence struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, a particularly ideologically rich era (Henshaw 2016; Thomas and Bond 2015).

The meso-level analysis of gender relations inside rebellion shows remarkably consistent patterns of women’s exclusion from power across a diverse range of groups. Gender-segregated command chains are common, reflecting the pervasiveness of gender inequality. Even in rebellion, though power structures are being disrupted and transformed, patriarchy is reasserted and men have privileged access to the new political and military space created. In addition to formal military and political hierarchies, women’s and men’s social and personal life is also tightly controlled. Marriage and sexuality are key tools of control for keeping members within the group, managing their mobility and emotional attachments outside of the group, and mitigating intra-group strife caused by violence and jealousy (Marks 2014). Bodily autonomy is also policed, though in highly gender differentiated ways. While men and boys lose the right to refuse to fight at the frontlines or carry out violent missions, women and girls often lose freedom of choice with regard to sex and reproduction. These represent particularly invasive forms of organizational control, as rebel leaders dictate women’s use of contraception and right to abortion and reproduction. Though often clearly articulated and documented within group policies, the loss of bodily autonomy remains hugely under-researched, with little scholarship on the governance of sex, health, and family units in rebellion.

In war, as in peace, the performance of gender and gender roles affects how power is distributed and negotiated by intersecting with a range of other characteristics that are ascribed social significance, from age and ethnicity, to education and marital status. Romantic partnerships can offer some women ready access to social power, political influence, and material resources.

Meanwhile, other female combatants rely on violence and militarism to secure their status. The divide between women who conform to traditional feminine expectations in rebellion, and those who challenge them through militarism, reflects the difficulty of finding space – even in revolution – for gender norms to be fluid and multiple. Instead, the acute militarist project of maintaining insurgency often requires hyper-performance of gender roles in order to access the highest echelons of power. The result for women and men involved in rebellion is a tiered experience of vulnerability, where some members are able to enjoy great freedom, while others are subject to the most inhumane violence and social control.

Future research must examine how these gendered experiences of rebellion affect individual outcomes after conflict. Is disarmament the great equalizer, regardless of women’s status during the war? As Hills and MacKenzie (Chapter 28, this volume) show, the post-conflict moment often leads to the stigmatization and remarginalization of female fighters. What gender roles or rebel group dynamics might lead to alternative outcomes, if any? This chapter has only scratched the surface of the unique intersection between social and political domains that is a feature of rebellion. Further comparison with state militaries, which have decidedly different levels of institutional and logistical

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support, may sharpen our insight into the particularities of gender in insurgency. Ideology cuts across these issues. Difficult to operationalize and nearly impossible to quantify, social and political ideologies are often seen by members as the raison d’être of rebellion, drawing together diverse actors motivated by a range of proximate, contingent, and deep-seated causes. When we are able to connect these ideas with structures, and individuals with groups, our comparative analyses will reveal gender dynamics with even greater clarity and nuance.

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Zoe Marks is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Lecturer in the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research focuses on conflict and civil war, armed groups, gender relations, and post-conflict development in sub-Saharan Africa. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Sierra Leone examining the internal dynamics of rebellion, and the role of gender and power in shaping victimhood and survival in wartime. Her current research projects span the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone and examine ex-combatants’ post-conflict trajectories; gender, peacebuilding, and political settlements; and reparations for war crimes.