Women and political violence: Coercion or choice?

Student post by Erica Buckingham and Caroline Spangler

In a recent event in Washington, DC, on June 20, sponsored by the Gender and Conflict Speaker Series, Joyce Kaufman and Kristen Williams discussed the topic of women involved in political violence. Their research in conflict torn areas, such as Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia, reveals that some women choose to engage in violence as a way to gain political agency by challenging gender norms. This presentation was supported by USAID’s Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA) and their Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation (CMM).

Kaufman and Williams outlined four possible political responses of women in situations of conflict and political violence:

Woman peace advocate for Palestine, 2010. Flickr, Creative Commons

• Do nothing
• Flee and become political refugees
• Become peace activists
• Become active combatants

Their research focused on options three and four and sought to understand the factors, motivations, and patterns that spur women to choose violence over peace, or vice versa, when responding to conflict.

They found five main motivations for women’s engagement in political violence:

• Survival
• Recruitment
• Fighting for “the cause”
• Personal factors such as revenge
• Feminist reasons

Regardless of a woman’s decision to turn to violence or peace, Kaufman and Williams found that women in both groups used their actions as a means of political expression.

Looking specifically at female suicide bombers, they found that women embrace this most extreme form of violence as a way to challenge the social, political, and cultural structure in traditional societies. Kaufman and Williams stated that an astounding 30% of suicide bombers are women and they emphasized how women who become suicide bombers do so as a form of political agency. However, Kaufman and Williams also noted that although these women had embraced their agency, it was a “constrained agency,” meaning these women’s actions were restricted to the orders of male leaders.

From their presentation, the take home message was that gendered roles of a violent man and a peaceful woman must be broken and need to be questioned. Women can, in fact, be caring mothers, yet also violent extremists.

This then raises a challenging argument: Is this newfound recognition of women as violent beings ultimately empowering or destructive? We can argue that women have found a place in a conflict torn world where they can make the ultimate stand for their beliefs. However, should we really be celebrating the fact that the highest form of power these women have within their patriarchal societies is killing themselves? If women really want to make a difference, it seems they have no choice but to take extreme action. It is a difficult issue that left us questioning whether women had agency or if their actions were determined entirely by a patriarchal order.

Erica Buckingham is a second-year M.A. student in the International Development Studies Program at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. She is concentrating in anthropology and is interested in human rights and gender issues. She is currently the Program Assistant for the Global Gender Initiative (GGI) and the Culture in Global Affairs (CIGA) Research and Policy Programs of the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University.

Caroline Spangler is a third-year undergraduate student at the College of Arts and Science at New York University. She is majoring in anthropology and is interested in human rights. She is currently an intern for the Global Gender Initiative (GGI) of the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University.