Victimcy, Girlfriending, Soldiering : Tactic Agency in a Young Woman's Social Navigation of the Liberian War Zone

Research on violent mobilization broadly emphasizes who joins rebellions and why, but neglects to explain the timing or nature of participation. Support and logistical apparatuses play critical roles in sustaining armed conflict, but scholars have not explained role differentiation within militant organizations or accounted for the structures, processes, and practices that produce discrete categories of fighters, soldiers, and staff. Extant theories consequently conflate mobilization and participation in rebel organizations with frontline combat. This article argues that, to understand wartime mobilization and organizational resilience, scholars must situate militants in their organizational and social context. By tracing the emergence and evolution of female-dominated clandestine supply, financial, and information networks in 1980s Lebanon, it demonstrates that mobilization pathways and organizational subdivisions emerge from the systematic overlap between formal militant hierarchies and quotidian social networks. In doing so, this article elucidates the nuanced relationship between social structure, militant organizations, and sustained rebellion.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003055413000208

Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization and Social Networks in War

Dominic Ongwen is an indicted war criminal and former child soldier in one of the world's most brutal rebel organisations, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Ongwen is at once victim and perpetrator: what justice strategy is relevant? I introduce the concept of complex political perpetrators to describe youth who occupy extremely marginal spaces in settings of chronic crisis, and who use violence as an expression of political agency. Ongwen represents a troupe of young rebels who were ‘bred’ in the shadows of illiberal war economies. Excluded from the polity, or rather never having been socialised within it, such complex political perpetrators must be recognised in the debate on transitional justice after mass atrocity, lest cycles of exclusion and violence as politics by another means continue.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/30224939.pdf

Complex political perpetrators reflections on Dominic Ongwen

Much of the current scholarship on wartime violence, including studies of the combatants themselves, assumes that women are victims and men are perpetrators. However, there is an increasing awareness that women in armed groups may be active fighters who function as more than just cooks, cleaners, and sexual slaves. In this article, the author focuses on the involvement of female fighters in a form of violence that is commonly thought to be perpetrated only by men: the wartime rape of noncombatants. Using original interviews with ex-combatants and newly available survey data, she finds that in the Sierra Leone civil war, female combatants were participants in the widespread conflict-related violence, including gang rape. A growing body of evidence from other conflicts suggests that Sierra Leone is not an anomaly and that women likely engage in conflict-related violence, including sexual violence, more often than is currently believed. Many standard interpretations of wartime rape are undermined by the participation of female perpetrators. To explain the involvement of women in wartime rape, the author argues that women in armed group units face similar pressure to that faced by their male counterparts to participate in gang rape. The study has broad implications for future avenues of research on wartime violence, as well as for policy.

/pdf/female-combatants-and-the-perpetration-of-violence-wartime-29292331bo.pdf

Female Combatants and the Perpetration of Violence: Wartime Rape in the Sierra Leone Civil War

This paper examines agrarian issues in civil wars in Cote d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone. Attention is paid to two different ways in which lineage society evolved during the colonial and post-colonial periods. The motivations of fighters are related to these different trajectories of agrarian social change. In Cote d’Ivoire youth militia fought to uphold a lineage-based social order, but in Sierra Leone a comparable group of young fighters sought to overturn it. Large migrant populations on a forest frontier are an important factor in Cote d’Ivoire, while in Sierra Leone significance attaches to an excluded agrarian underclass. Not all African conflicts are ethnic conflicts; autochthony is shown to be a factor in one conflict and class in the other. Approaches to post-war reconstruction based on undifferentiated notions of community should be resisted.

West African Insurgencies in Agrarian Perspective: Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone Compared

Introduction 1. A Decade of War-Centuries of Uncertainty 2. Gendered Lives in Rural Sierra Leone 3. Abduction and Everyday Rebel Life 4. From Rape Victims to Female Fighters 5. Reconciliation or Revenge 6. Surviving the Postwar Economy 7. Coming Home-Domesticating the Bush Conclusion Notes References Index -- Cornell University Press

Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers: Women's Lives through War and Peace in Sierra Leone

This article looks at how the category of female fighters in the Sierra Leone civil war (1991–2002) was interpreted by the local population and by the international humanitarian community. The category of the female fighter both challenges and confuses the gendered stereotypes of ‘woman the victim’ and ‘man the perpetrator’ on multiple levels. Most research on ‘women and war’ focuses on women either as inherently more peaceful or merely as victims, and often unwittingly reproduces in ‘war-affected women’ a corresponding lack of ‘agency’. In this article, I criticize such theorizing by demonstrating the diversity and specificity of Sierra Leonean women’s war experiences, while also examining how the notion of and discourse about war itself is gendered. While it has become necessary to expand the inquiries into what women do in war and to critically analyse women’s roles as perpetuators and perpetrators of war and conflict, this article maintains that in situations where one can talk about the violence of women, as in the example of female combatants, one often finds violence against women as well.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.fr.9400385.pdf

female fighters in the Sierra Leone war: challenging the assumptions?

In the numerous armed conflicts that are tearing the African continent apart, young women are participants and carry guns alongside their male comrades-in-arms. Challenging the stereotype of women ...

/pdf/young-female-fighters-in-african-wars-conflict-and-its-1e4e1lvyso.pdf

Young Female Fighters in African Wars: Conflict and Its Consequences

This study is about young Sierra Leonean women’s wartime and post-war experiences and the social processes involved in shaping both these experiences and the way they were articulated through war a ...

Being a bush wife : women's lives through war and peace in northern Sierra Leone

The Post War Moment: Female Fighters in Sierra Leone

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