Combatant

Abstract: This article challenges the idea that women are necessarily more peaceful than men by looking at examples of female combatants in ethno-nationalist military organizations in Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland. Anti-state, ‘liberatory’ nationalisms often provide more space (ideologically and practically) for women to participate as combatants than do institutionalized state or pro-state nationalisms, and this can be seen in the cases of the LTTE in Sri Lanka and the IRA in Northern Ireland when contrasted with loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. However, the role of the female combatant is ambiguous and indicates a tension between different conceptualizations of societal security, where female combatants both fight against societal insecurity posed by the state and contribute to internal societal insecurity within their ethno-national groups.

Abstract: The cultural approach to oral history suggests that narrators draw on public discourses in constructing accounts of their pasts for their audiences. As well as endeavouring to compose memory stories they seek composure, or personal equanimity, from the practice of narration. But how does gender intersect with these processes and what happens when public discourses have little to offer on a particular aspect of the past? This article investigates these questions through oral history accounts of experiences in Britain in the Second World War. It explores the relationship to personal narratives of cultural silences concerning, for example, civilian men and combatant women, and concludes that the achievement of composure is problematic in the face of lost histories.

Abstract: In the “human security” era (since approximately the end of the cold war), a burgeoning literature in political science has debated both the effects of the civilian immunity norm and the tensions in the concept, ostensibly to better understand how to protect civilians in armed conflict. Yet as Helen Kinsella rightly tells us, there has been too little critical attention to the concept of the civilian itself. Her sweeping historical genealogy of the “civilian” not only debunks various myths about the concept but also exposes certain problems and tensions that may be at the root of the current crisis in the civilian immunity norm itself. The Image before the Weapon makes two key contributions to scholarship on the laws of war. The first is its stunningly comprehensive historical breadth. Kinsella traces the concept of the civilian from medieval times through the colonial era and up to its eventual, gradual, and deeply politicized codification in the formal laws of war only a few decades ago. In each epoch she demonstrates in detail how notions of civilian immunity and their semantic and conceptual underpinnings were connected to broader sociohistorical processes by which diplomats, theorists, and statesmen reconceived world orders— and by which weapons-bearers enacted these orders on civilians. Her analysis demonstrates that, as she puts it, “the laws of war might be best characterized as a strategic expression of morals and a moral expression of strategies” (p. ). This is a helpful rearticulation of the existing consensus among even constructivist international relations theorists of the law of war: that the law reflects power structures even as it regulates behavior within those structures. For Kinsella, the relevant structures include not just power differentials between states but between categories of states, social orders, and gender, race, and class hierarchies. The value of Kinsella’s contribution is in its depth as well as breadth. Her discussion of the codification of humanitarian law at the Geneva conferences in  and the later revising of the law in  to fit postcolonial realities is one of the best, and hers is the only critical treatment of these events as they pertain to the concept of the “civilian.” In particular, she exposes the political

Abstract: Organized rape has been an integral aspect of warfare for a long time even though classics on warfare have predominantly focused on theorizing ‘regular’ warfare, that is, the situations in which one army encounters another in a battle to conquer or defend a territory. Recently, however, much attention has been paid to asymmetric warfare and, accordingly, to phenomena such as guerrilla tactics, terrorism, hostage taking and a range of identity-related aspects of war such as religious fundamentalism, holy war, ethnic cleansing and war rape. In fact, war rape can be taken as a perfect example of an asymmetric strategy. In war rape the soldier attacks a civilian (not a fellow combatant) and a woman (not another male soldier), and does this only indirectly with the aim of holding or taking a territory. The primary target here is to inflict trauma and through this to destroy family ties and group solidarity within the enemy camp. This article understands war rape as a fundamental way of abandoning subjects: rape is the mark of sovereignty stamped directly on the body, that is, it is essentially a bio-political strategy using (or better, abusing) the distinction between the self and the body. Through an analysis of the way rape was carried out by the predominantly paramilitary Serbian forces on Bosnian soil, this article theorizes a two-fold practice of abjection: through war rape an abject is introduced within the woman’s body (sperm or forced pregnancy), transforming her into an abject-self rejected by the family, excluded by the community and quite often also the object of a self-hate, sometimes to the point of suicide. This understanding of war rape is developed in the article through a synthesis of the literature on abandonment (Agamben, Schmitt) and abjection (Bataille, Douglas, Kristeva) and concomitantly it is argued that the penetration of the woman’s body works as a metaphor for the penetration of enemy lines. In addition it is argued that this bio-political strategy, like other forms of sovereignty, operates through the creation of an ‘inclusive exclusion’. The woman and the community in question are inscribed within the enemy realm of power as those excluded.