Female Combatants after Armed Struggle: Lost in Transition?

Description

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. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Foreword Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Introduction Introduction Theorising the ‘post-conflict’ moment Women, gender, and conflict transition: contextualising the study Female combatants: the outsiders’ outsider? Why republican women? The purpose and significance of the study Feminist research methodologies and methods The research process Organisation of the book Notes Bibliography Chapter 2: Who fought the war? The gendered constructions of soldiering roles in post-war commemorative processes Introduction ‘I was involved’: republican women and the meaning of combatant ‘Women were not just the backbone’: blurring the lines of fighter/supporter ‘A lesser species of revolutionaries?’ Women and armed struggle Republican commemoration and the ‘invisibility’ of women Re-writing themselves back into history Conclusion Notes Bibliography Chapter 3: Gendering the post-conflict narrative Introduction ‘No link to England’: republicans at peace? ‘Despair and the dole’: positive peace in the context of neo-liberal capitalism? Conceptualising women’s equality Gender-based violence Homophobia Reproductive rights Continuum of violence; continuum of struggle Conclusion Notes Bibliography Chapter 4: From the front lines of war to the sidelines of peace? Republican women and the Irish peace process Introduction ‘Ceasefire soldiers’: post-war republican politics Diminished returns? Reconfiguring gender roles during peace negotiations ‘Put a feminist stamp on it’: Clár na mBan A gendered casualty of peace: the Sinn Féin women’s department ‘Just faded away?’ A most ambiguous ending Conclusion Notes Bibliography Chapter 5: Beyond regression: Change and continuity in women’s post-war activism Introduction ‘It’s important, but it’s not enough’: institutional politics and conflict transition ‘We want results’: grassroots and community organising Conclusion Notes Bibliography Chapter 6: Conclusion Introduction Women’s struggle after armed struggle Concluding thoughts Notes Bibliography Index