Women’s Contributions as Combatants

Scholarship focused on women’s participation in fighting roles has found that such activities are fairly common, though the scope and scale of this involvement varies between VNSAs (Alison, 2009; Cohen, 2013; Gowrinathan, 2021; Henshaw, 2016; Thomas & Bond, 2015; Wood, 2019; Wood & Thomas, 2017). In some groups, particularly left-wing ones, women constitute around half of all combatants (Wood & Thomas, 2017). For example, women composed a third of fighters in the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) during the Ethiopian Civil War (Burgess, 2013). Berhe (2009, p. 136) also suggested that women stepped into fighting roles without officially joining the TPLF rebellion: “Parallel to the formation of regular fighting forces, a militia army, as a rearguard, was established throughout rural Tigrai[ . . . ] 5–10% of the militia were women.” Women’s participation in such roles often represents a sharp break in prevailing gender norms, which portray women as inherently peaceful.

Women’s front-line participation is limited in other VNSAs. Attacks perpetrated by women in al-Shabaab in Somalia, for example, are “in the single digits,” while women committed more than half of the suicide bombings for Boko Haram, an ideological peer in Nigeria (Allotey-Pappoe & Lamptey, 2019; International Crisis Group, 2019; Warner & Matfess, 2017). During Mozambique’s liberation war, the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) reportedly recruited “hundreds” of women and girls into the military (Katto, 2014, p. 540). But many of those trained note that they never actually participated in combat (Katto, 2014, p. 540).

On the front-line, women combatants engage in firefights with security forces (Alison, 2009), plant explosive devices (Wahidin, 2016), commit assassinations and suicide bombings (Gonzalez-Perez, 2006; Thomas, 2021b), and target civilians (Gonzalez-Perez, 2006; Thomas, 2021b). Women also commit sexual violence including rape (Cohen, 2013; Sjoberg, 2016). Still, as Trisko Darden and Steflja (2020, n.p.) contend, “Women war criminals go unnoticed because their participation in exceptional wartime violence challenges deeply held assumptions about war and about women.”

Women fighters’ participation has tangible consequences. One study suggests that rebel groups with voluntarily recruited female combatants are likeliest to win (Braithwaite & Ruiz, 2018). Suicide attacks perpetrated by women are in many cases most lethal, and female-perpetrated terrorist attacks garner the most media coverage (O’Rourke, 2009; Thomas, 2021b).³ Conflicts fought by rebel groups with female combatants are also among the longest, likely due to the increased resilience women offer rebellions (Giri & Haer, 2021) or to how women’s participation affects state and rebel bargaining processes aimed at ending armed violence (Wood & Allemang, 2021).

Women’s participation in VNSAs may also result in more sympathetic media coverage and international attention: journalists devote disproportionate attention to women fighters. For example, Sjoberg (2018, p. 303) noted that in international media coverage of Daesh and Kurdish militants fighting against them, “Brave women[ . . . ] exercising political agency to combat [Daesh] signifies the political legitimacy of their cause.”⁴ Indeed, evidence from Manekin and Wood’s study (2020) suggested that the presence of female combatants can help rebel groups secure external support.

Women’s Contributions in Non-Combat Roles

As the literature on rebel governance demonstrates, front-line fighting does not constitute the totality of armed violence (cf. Arjona et al., 2015; Mampilly, 2012). Women indeed make critical contributions as the logistical and organizational scaffolding of resistance and rebellion efforts. They work as nurses, medics, cooks, spies, scouts, intelligence officers, smugglers, couriers, planners, administrators, recruiters, mobilizers, radio or weapons operators, and guards, among a myriad of other roles. In the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), for example, reportedly an estimated 35% of administrators were women, as were 55% of health care workers and 32% of communications workers (Müller, 2005). In Frelimo, many female participants were weapons experts, intelligence gatherers, recruiters, educators, farmers, nurses, and medics (Katto, 2014). And because of the nearly universal expectation that women are nonviolent, women make effective spies and clandestine operators.

Women also contribute significantly to VNSA community outreach efforts by fundraising, recruiting members, and proselytizing. Consider the Syrian Sisters, a group of women affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood who established “civil society organizations to provide services to the exiled Syrian community” (Lefevre, 2013, n.p.). When Arab Spring protests in Syria turned violent, “these charities formed the backbone of the Muslim Brotherhood’s relief efforts—which have helped women heighten their profile within the organization and reach leadership positions” (Lefevre, 2013, n.p.).

In some community-based armed groups, women are responsible for conducting traditional ceremonies for fighters before they leave for a raid, thus serving as a critical link between group activity and the community. For example, Mkutu’s account (2005, p. 140) of pastoralist women in the North Rift noted that women use clothing and ceremonies to promote conflict, observing that they “smear [their sons] and they make them pass through their legs. When they return from revenge, they dance and sing songs of praise.”

Women often perform combat and non-combat tasks in tandem. Writing on the RUF in Sierra Leone, MacKenzie (2012, p. 54) argued that “the distinction between combatant and support is not useful” because many women and girls participated in both fighting and support roles. She concluded that this binary between role-types prioritizes war contributions that involve weapons and that, in reality, women (and men) perform in a myriad of positions.

Despite the importance of women’s non-combat contributions, researchers, practitioners, and governments often group non-combatant women together as simply “not soldiers,” minimizing their contributions and overlooking their involvement (MacKenzie, 2012). One reason that women’s non-combat contributions might be minimized is that women often do work for VNSAs that mirror work traditionally performed by women in the domestic sphere. For example, observers often write off women as “wives” or “girlfriends” of combatants to depoliticize and downplay their involvement. But in many cases, wives and girlfriends explicitly contribute to group operations and serve in important leadership positions. Wives of commanders ran RUF camps and selected women for specific non-combat jobs (Lahai, 2013). Husband and wife “teams” also perpetrated Basque Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) attacks in Spain (Merkl, 1986). And though news reporting and some scholarship focused on the “jihadi brides” of Daesh, participants viewed marriage and motherhood as part of an ideological commitment to political violence and a critical, operational commitment to reproducing generations of fighters (Loken & Zelenz, 2018).

Women’s Contributions to Group Leadership

Women also occupy leadership positions within many VNSAs, both in the political structure and in military hierarchies. Henshaw and colleagues (2019) concluded that at least 28% of sampled rebel organizations operating between 1990 and 2008 include at least one woman in a leadership role. An estimated 20% of Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) military leadership was female, and all of the Front’s member organizations had senior female commanders (Viterna, 2013). In the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), women participated in mixed units and women commanders oversaw women and men (Utas, 2003).

Women are also involved in political leadership. In some cases, this enables them to shape organizational platforms, outreach, or electoral strategies. For example, women compose a substantial and active proportion of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). EZLN women created “policy on women’s social and economic rights” and “contributed to negotiations with the Mexican government” (Gonzalez-Perez, 2006, p. 323). Women leaders and supporters drafted the EZLN’s “Women’s Revolutionary Law,” which was approved by the organization’s Assembly and “provides a regulatory framework for the rights and aspirations of indigenous women and positions them as active agents or subjects of their own history” (Pinheiro Barbosa, 2021, p. 12). Women’s political leadership is also not limited to gender egalitarian or leftist VNSA: for instance, Jad (2011) found that eight, or just over 15%, of members of Hamas’s Consultative Council were women.

Other VNSAs restrict women’s leadership. This is true even of relatively gender- progressive organizations with large proportions of women participants. Consider, for example, the Tupamaros in Uruguay: estimates suggest that women composed a substantive proportion of group members, but “there [were] fewer women in the organization in the positions of power and in military tasks” than other roles (Vidaurrazaga Aránguiz, 2019, p. 18). One former female militant recalled that leadership roles for women were “very few, very few . . . there was a woman as a commando at some point” (Vidaurrazaga Aránguiz, 2019, p. 19). At the same time, “The Tupamaros used popular societal stereotypes about women as harmless in order to help them in armed missions [ . . . ] incarcerated Tupamara usually functioned as an arm of propaganda for the organization” (Churchill, 2014, p. 153).

Women’s Wings

Though women work side by side with men in a myriad of roles, women also organize all-female units within VNSAs. These units, identified here as “women’s wings,” can be important spaces for women to develop a gendered political consciousness, to cultivate ties with like-minded others, and to develop a community among women that has a shared set of experiences and interests (Luciak, 1998; Shayne, 2004). These organizations can provide opportunities for women to rise to leadership positions within VNSAs (Henshaw et al., 2019), and they often persist into the post-conflict period.

VNSAs of all ideological stripes and political contexts have organized women’s wings. For example, the Amal Movement in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, the Free Papua Movement (OPM) in Indonesia, and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) all operated Women’s Departments. Some all-female units are brigades for fighters. For instance, the all-women “Lal Dasta” (Red Brigade) of the Communist Party India–Maoist (CPI-Maoist) reportedly carried out audacious attacks (Parashar, 2016). ZAPU also trained women separately in the all-female camps, and the group was training over 1,000 women for military action when the war ended (Lyons, 2004).

Women’s wings can also serve as auxiliaries or a political arm for VNSAs’ militant wings. The Polisario Front, for example, operates the National Union of Sahrawi Women (NUSW), which organizes nonmilitary Polisario activities (Lippert, 1992). Led by women, the NUSW also administered refugee camps in all aspects, including health care, logistics, and education. In Myanmar, the Karen National United Party (KNU) also operates a women’s group, the Karen Women’s Organization (KWO). In the 1980s, during the civil war, its objective was “to support the KNU through engagement in social work” (Israelsen, 2019, p. 182). KWO women were engaged in the “orphans and war victims” and mobilizing women’s participation in the KNU’s mission (Israelsen, 2018, p. 392). Near the end of the conflict, they began offering programs focused on women’s rights and education (Israelsen, 2018). Its leaders were women, appointed by KNU members.

Yet, some women members report frustration with the subordination of women’s wings within VNSAs. Even in groups with gender emancipatory platforms and where women compose a significant membership, gendered issues may be put on the back burner or sacrificed in the face of “more pressing” political concerns. Examining how women organize or are organized can shed light on the heterogeneity of women’s interests within the same movement. Consider, for example, the tension between Cumann na mBan, the women’s wing affiliated with the Provisional IRA, and the organization’s female fighters. There was internal criticism of the original Cumann na mBan as being “handmaidens” to the Irish Volunteers, which was seen as a retrograde step for the women who were campaigning for women’s emancipation in the 1910s and 1920s (McAuliffe, 2014). Cumann na mBann opposed the 1968 decision to allow women to become members of the IRA’s General Army, suggesting an internal controversy about what the proper role for women was within the movement and in society (Reinisch, 2013). In other cases, members of all-female units may develop a mindset of “double militancy,” in which they both fight for the cause of the group and for women’s rights during and after conflict (Ortega, 2015).⁵

Discursive Contributions: Representations of Women in Armed Organizations

Women’s contributions to VNSAs are not limited to organizations’ tactical capabilities or political strategy. Women’s involvement, both actual and symbolic, can have significant narrative utility for violent organizations because female participation can legitimize belligerents to key audiences. This is for two reasons. First, women-inclusive rebellions better reflect their target populations and can encourage broader support. Indeed, the social movements literature has recommended diversity for building sustainable movements, concluding that people are most likely to participate when they see themselves and their communities represented. As Stephan and Chenoweth (2008, p. 9) contended, campaign success relies on the ability to enhance “domestic and international legitimacy and encourages more broad-based participation in the resistance, which translates into increased pressure being brought to bear on the target.”

For example, in Uganda, the National Resistance Army (NRA) mobilized women combatants to engender civilian support. Mugambe (2000, p. 10) concluded that women involved in mobilization work were “very instrumental” in “convincing [others] to join or support the ‘guerrilla’ forces” because “women are community managers. They can organise members in their communities to do what they want for their own good.”

Second, “because women are assumed to be nonviolent, their participation in militant groups can humanize organizations and legitimize rebellion” (Loken, 2021, p. 22). As Matfess and Nagel (2020, n.p.) concluded of rebel groups, including women can “project an image of modern gender egalitarianism and concern with ‘softer’ issues in addition to military tactics.” Cross-national evidence has suggested that VNSAs capitalize on these gendered dynamics. In Nepal, for example, Maoists “mobilized women to give the message that the armed conflict was a demand on all people; such a noble war that even women would fight, supporting and sympathizing with it” (Dahal, 2015, p. 188). Such accounts suggested that “the cause is so important that the society needs women to move outside of their traditional and natural gender roles to bravely join the fight” (Sjoberg, 2018, p. 303). To this end, Loken (2021) demonstrated how rebels employ images of armed mothers to express circumstantial exigency (women combatants) without overstepping gendered, social boundaries (still mothers).

Thus, women’s participation may help legitimize VNSAs by humanizing their efforts, by making them appear inclusive rather than extremist, and by suggesting that conditions are so severe that even the most vulnerable are taking up arms. Viterna (2013), for instance, found that the FMLN used women as recruiters to empower potential female cadres and encourage the families of young prospects. These insurgents would get close to families, who reported being more comfortable letting their children join when approached by female recruiters. They reportedly viewed women as least threatening and most trustworthy (Viterna, 2013).

Representations of women fighters may also facilitate external support. The survey by Manekin and Wood (2020) experimented with national and student samples in the United States and suggested that respondents are more supportive of a fictitious, South Asian rebel group and its goals when they believe that women participate in the organization on the front lines. Wood (2019) also found that rebel groups with female combatants are most likely to receive external support from transnational activists and diasporas. Relatedly, images of women combatants in rebel propaganda are often accompanied by native language text and English translations, and supportive organizations use these images abroad to advance rebel efforts (Loken, 2018, 2021).

VNSAs may also rely on gendered representations of women combatants to shame men into participating in armed conflict. Szekely (2020, p. 421) concluded that the Free Syrian Army exaggerates and publicizes women’s involvement for this purpose: “there is also a subset of propaganda videos produced by various FSA factions featuring female fighters as a means of shaming men [ . . . ] for not participating in the war. [ . . . ] There are, however, few accounts of these factions actually participating in battle.”

In other VNSAs, women publicly call for a return to traditional gender roles that the state has disrupted. Groups like Dukhtarane-Millat (DeM) in India and Daesh recruit Muslim women by stressing the need to return to conservative, patriarchal values. Daesh, like other movements, aims to present an alternative vision of society. These groups link their jihad to the stifling of “appropriate” gender performance by the West and use women to demonstrate a commitment to piety and proper family roles (Loken & Zelenz, 2018; Vale, 2019). Framed this way, women feature prominently in Daesh propaganda.

Negotiating Settlements

Though women compose key parts of VNSAs’ leadership structures, they rarely participate in negotiating the settlements, such as peace agreements, that often end armed fighting. There are exceptions. For example, one of the five Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) delegates who negotiated the peace deal in the Philippines was a woman (Santiago, 2015). The 2014 peace agreement included specific provisions for decommissioning MILF women auxiliaries and reintegrating them into the labor force (Hall & Hoare, 2015). Female ex-combatants of the FARC also participated in negotiating the recent Colombian accords that demobilized many former fighters.

But in other cases, group leadership restricts women from the negotiating table (Henshaw, 2019). For example, during peace negotiations, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) nominated a “small handful of women leaders” as members of their delegation, but women were often added with short notice or preparation, and attention to gender issues among negotiating parties was minimal (Small Arms Survey, 2008, p. 4). Women similarly found themselves excluded in the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoists (CPN-M)’s negotiations despite composing between 20% and 40% of the group’s membership (Dahal, 2015; Yadav, 2016). Women participated as commanders and in high military ranks (Dahal, 2015) as well as reportedly made up at least 10% of the Central Committee and other political positions (South Asia Terrorism Portal [SATP], 2017). The CPN-M operated a Women’s Front, for which secretary-general was a leadership position held by women, and women were brigade commissioners (Ogura, 2008). Still, women were not part of the peace negotiations at the end of the conflict.

This matters in part because negotiations excluding women are neither representative of nor, often, attuned to the breadth of participants and their wants or needs. This further entrenches women’s relative lack of visibility and negotiating power during war. Moreover, broader research on peace processes concluded that “women’s participation in peace negotiations contributes to the quality and durability of peace after civil war” (Krause et al., 2018, p. 985). And while the link between female combatants and settlement durability has not, to our knowledge, been robustly examined, Krause and colleagues (2018) found that rebel organizations with female combatants are most likely to secure durable periods of peace after settlement. It is important to note, however, that incorporating women into peace negotiations is not a guarantee that women’s issues will be adequately addressed. Women included in peace negotiations may prioritize the political agenda of the armed group over women’s issues.

Formal Demobilization and Reintegration Programming

Demobilization and reintegration are other significant concerns for post-conflict processes. Initially, formal DDR programs demonstrated a lack of gendered awareness that kept many women from participating. For example, some required women to present a firearm to qualify for inclusion, but many women found their weapons confiscated by other participants and others lacked firearms to present because of their shifting roles within VNSAs over time (Bouta, 2005). While many modern DDR programs have learned from these mistakes, there is still a considerable degree of institutional uncertainty of how to treat women and girls associated with armed groups. The pioneering examination by Mazurana and colleagues (2002, p. 118) of women’s experiences in DDR programs highlighted how a “series of miscalculations . . . .around the experiences of girl soldiers during armed conflict and the multidimensional role of gender as it affects girls in the conflict and postconflict periods” undermine efforts to reintegrate women.

Specifically, DDR programs still struggle with reintegrating women who served in primarily non-combat roles. As Coulter and colleagues (2008, p. 22) contended, “women who are only thought of as abducted women, sex slaves or simply as camp followers, and are excluded from formal demobilization, have actually formed the backbone of many armed forces, and were as such vital to the war enterprise.” The UN considers non-combat women, wives, and others to be “Women Associated with Armed Forces (WAAFs)” grouped together on the basis of simply not being fighters. As a result, critical DDR programming aimed at reintegrating women into post-conflict life often misses those in need of the programs’ financial, education, and potentially depoliticizing benefits (Mackenzie, 2009).

Another issue is that “for the women who are able to access them, the content of DDR often does not reflect their wartime experiences or post-demobilization needs” (Mazurana et al., 2018, p. 2). Coulter and colleagues (2008) noted that some women purposefully avoid DDR programs because they fear stigmatization if their identities as fighters were revealed. Others share significant safety concerns about demobilization centers and processes and encounter logistical hurdles like a lack of child care, lack of transportation, or inability to both care for family and self-livelihood while also meeting the requirements of DDR programming (Mazurana et al., 2018). Moreover, female former combatants are often provided opportunities and training associated with “traditional” gendered labor that they may not be interested in, including hairdressing, secretarial work, and other domestic tasks (Sabogal & Richter, 2019, n.p.). In Ethiopia, the attempt to train female EPLF veterans in “traditional female crafts [ . . . ] was a complete failure” and was abandoned after just a few years (Mehreteab, 2002, p. 49).

Mazurana and colleagues (2018, p. 13) recommended a “portfolio view” rather than a “project view” of DDR, wherein participants can choose from a “menu of options” based on what best suits their needs and interests instead of a program that “typically necessitates that beneficiaries participate in a series of predetermined and limited activities.” This approach more fully considers the full range of women’s—and men’s—activities within VNSAs, the nature of the internal hierarchies and beneficiaries’ standing within these rankings, social gender dynamics, the transferability of the skills that women developed during war to the post-conflict period, and the nature of some women’s identity transformations as a part of the armed group.

Accountability for Violence and Affiliation With Non-State Groups

More holistic assessments of women’s participation in VNSA’s are critical not only for meeting former militants’ needs and building durable periods of security and nonviolence, but also for evaluating accountability for wartime human rights violations. A small but important literature has identified how persistent gender norms coupled with a failure to recognize women’s agency can produce judicial impunity for politically violent crimes.

Steflja and Trisko Darden’s research (2020) on women war criminals demonstrated that the few women subject to criminal proceedings for their actions leveraged sociopolitical, gendered beliefs regarding women’s inherent peacefulness, their identities as mothers, and their lack of political agency in their defenses despite holding high-ranking positions in VNSAs. Similarly, in their analysis of the U.S. criminal justice system’s treatment of women accused of terrorism, Alexander and Turkington (2018, p. 24) noted that “from news media to defense attorneys, commentators regularly cast female terrorism offenders as naïve, gullible, susceptible targets of violent extremism, even when they admit their culpability by pleading guilty.” One defense memo, for example, describes the client as someone who “had ‘always been attracted to ‘bad boys’” and who “was drawn to the Islamic State ‘like the forbidden fruit’” (Alexander & Turkington, 2018, p. 24). The authors also found that women accused of supporting terrorist organizations receive shorter than average sentences, which they suggest is the result of pervasive gender assumptions about women’s lack of political agency and penchant for nonviolence (Alexander & Turkington, 2018, p. 24).

Women and Political Power After Conflict

A number of studies have found that conflict may bring about more opportunities for women to participate in political life. Indeed, in many cases, women’s participation in representative politics increases after periods of armed conflict. For example, Hughes and Tripp (2015, pp. 1515–1531) noted that in sub-Saharan Africa, “civil-war endings enabled faster and more sweeping changes in women’s legislative representation” because “large-scale wars are most likely to produce major disruptions in social relations, creating circumstances that allow for new understandings of women’s roles.”

When armed VNSAs demobilize or disband, participants return to civil society or transition into new roles. Often, former militants transition into nonviolent politics: over half of studied rebel organizations operating between 1990 and 2009 formed political parties that participated in elections after civil wars (Manning & Smith, 2016). In many, but not all, groups, former women combatants, leaders, and organizers make up part of these new political structures, contributing to women’s post-conflict political gains. For example, in Colombia, the FARC’s 2016 peace accords with the government produced a legally registered political party to compete in democratic elections. Women composed 23% of the party’s highest leadership in 2017 (Vanguardia, 2017). Female ex-combatants also represent the party in many local contests. One woman, running for a seat on Bogotá’s city council, campaigned under the slogan “From the jungles to city council.” Of the group’s Marxist platform, she concluded, “We were able to tell people what our grievances had been, what we want, and how we hope to build with the people,” reportedly “adding that people softened at seeing a human face behind what had been framed as a ruthless guerrilla group for decades” (quoted in Noriega, 2019, n.p.).

In other cases, however, women’s issues are marginalized or subordinated to the broader political agenda in the post-conflict period. For instance, after the war, the Sandinista women’s group, the Luisa Amanda Espinoza Association of Nicaraguan Women (AMNLAE) organized women to implement the political agenda of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). One report noted that, despite being an organization of and for women, AMNLAE prioritized “the needs of the population as a whole—such as improving health care and nutrition and keeping the economy moving . . . over adjusting relations between women and men” (Sherman, 1983, p. 8). In Eritrea, a leader of the National Union of Eritrean Women reported that after the war, there were complaints about the new government’s approach to women, especially given women’s contributions to the groups as VNSAs; she said “They say ‘after all we women did, the government is throwing us away, women are being sent back to the kitchen’” (Bernal, 2001, p. 141).