Female Fighters

Why Rebel Groups Recruit Women for War

Reed M. Wood

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780231550093
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The presence of women combatants on the battlefield—especially in large numbers—strikes many observers as a notable departure from the historical norm. Yet women have played a significant active role in many contemporary armed rebellions. Over recent decades, numerous resistance movements in many regions of the globe have deployed thousands of female fighters in combat.

In Female Fighters, Reed M. Wood explains why some rebel groups deploy women in combat while others exclude women from their ranks, and the strategic implications of this decision. Examining a vast original dataset on female fighters in over 250 rebel organizations, Wood argues rebel groups can gain considerable strategic advantages by including women fighters. Drawing on women increases the pool of available recruits and helps ameliorate resource constraints. Furthermore, the visible presence of female fighters often becomes an important propaganda tool for domestic and international audiences. Images of women combatants help raise a group's visibility, boost local recruitment, and aid the group's efforts to solicit support from transnational actors and diaspora communities. However, Wood finds that, regardless of the wartime resource challenges they face, religious fundamentalist rebels consistently resist utilizing female fighters. A rich, data-driven study, Female Fighters presents a systematic, comprehensive analysis of the impact women's participation has on organized political violence in the modern era.

CHAPTER 1

Why Rebels Mobilize Women for War

Between 1942 and 1945, thousands of women joined the National Liberation Army (NLA) to fight against the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia. Female fighters ultimately made up as much as 15 percent of the Partisan fighting forces, with many serving in frontline combat positions (Batinic 2015, 131–132; Jancar 1981). Despite the scope and scale of their eventual participation in the group, women were largely absent from the Partisan combat forces at the beginning of the conflict. While a few women served in the NLA at the insurgency’s outset, they were deployed almost exclusively in support roles (e.g., nursing, logistics, administration, etc.) and were generally prevented from directly participating in combat. By early 1942 this practice changed, and the NLA began training and arming female members and allowed some female recruits to serve in combat positions (Batinic 2015, 127–129). A series of recruitment campaigns undertaken by the NLA later that year further expanded the number of women in its ranks and contributed to the relatively high proportion of female fighters that participated in the resistance movement throughout the remainder of the conflict (130).

To explain the observed change in the NLA leadership’s position on the role of women in the group’s fighting force, previous studies have pointed to a combination of ideological and strategic factors. First, the NLA was closely connected to and largely traced it origins to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, an organization with a long history of advancing women’s rights and encouraging women’s political activism (Jancar 1981). As such, the incorporation of women into the Partisan forces was largely consistent with the prevailing Marxist ideology of the organization. In addition, some scholars contend that Partisan leaders sought to use the presence of female combatants to stress the gender egalitarian values of the movement and thus showcase their commitment to Marxist ideology to powerful Communist allies such the Soviet Union (Batinic 2015, 128–129; Jancar 1981, 150). These factors help explain the willingness of Tito and other NLA leaders to recruit female combatants. However, the acute resource demands the group experienced during winter of 1941–1942 arguably provide a more compelling explanation for the timing of the decision and the scope of the recruitment effort (Batinic 2015, 129–130). During this window of time, Partisan forces suffered heavy losses as they simultaneously attempted to repel multiple German offensives and engaged in frequent clashes with Chetnik forces. Manpower shortages resulting from these events left the Partisan forces weakened and placed the NLA’s long-term survival in jeopardy. The leadership’s decision to recruit women and deploy substantial numbers of these recruits in combat therefore corresponds to a period of acute resource constraints.

As I argue in this chapter, far from simply explaining the timing and scope of women’s participation in this specific case, the joint roles of ideology and resource constraints in shaping rebel leaders’ decision to mobilize women in war are broadly generalizable to a large number of civil conflicts. Using insights from existing “demand-side” models of rebel recruitment, I link female recruitment to the combination of the severity of the resource constraints imposed on the group as well as to leaders’ perceptions of the relative costs associated with opening recruitment opportunities to women as a means of addressing those constraints. More specifically, I argue that sharp increases in resource demands—such as those that occur during periods of intense fighting or following substantial troop losses—incentivize rebel leaders to recruit female fighters as a strategy of preserving or expanding the rebellion. However, the gender beliefs and attitudes of a group’s leadership as well as those of the constituencies on which the group relies for support determine the costs the leadership expects to incur from recruiting women and deploying them on the battlefield. The political ideology embraced by a rebel group—which I contend conveys important information about those expected costs—conditions the influence of resource demands on leaders’ decisions to employ female combatants. Consequently, despite their initial reluctance, secular rebel groups have become increasingly willing to utilize female combatants as war-related human resource constraints intensify. By contrast, armed groups that embrace ideologies oriented toward reinforcing or reaffirming traditional social hierarchies, which are comparatively more sensitive to the costs associated with recruiting female combatants, remain unlikely to recruit women for war even as sharply rising resource demands potentially jeopardize the movement’s ability to achieve its goals.

The Political Economy of Rebel Recruitment

The likelihood that a rebel movement survives and ultimately achieves its political and military objectives heavily depends on its ability to mobilize human and material resources (e.g., Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan 2009; Hultquist 2013). As such, resource mobilization, particularly the ability to recruit and retain collaborators and combatants, represents one of the central tasks of any successful rebel organization (Gates 2002; Leites and Wolf 1970, 32–34). To achieve this objective, rebels select from among a variety of recruitment strategies. Rebel leaders determine a set of incentives to offer to potential recruits, which typically includes some combination of coercive threats and promises of material (or nonmaterial) benefits. They likewise select the geographic areas in which they choose to recruit, the populations they intend to target for recruitment, and the types of recruits they are willing to accept.

In order to explain the recruitment strategies that rebels adopt—as well as the relative success of these strategies—previous studies have often relied on insights from industrial organization theory and labor economics (e.g., Gates 2002, 2017; Humphreys and Weinstein 2008; Weinstein 2007). While the specific theoretical models employed by these studies vary, most adopt some form of basic supply-demand framework. According to such approaches, rebel recruitment is a function of both the supply of individuals available to fight for the rebel group and the rebel leadership’s demand for these potential recruits. Furthermore, this framework implies that the ratio of the supply of potential recruits to the group’s demand for them determines the specific recruitment tactics it adopts. For example, scholars have previously employed this framework to explain the prevalence of child soldiers in armed groups (Achvarina 2010; Achvarina and Reich 2006; Andvig and Gates 2010; Beber and Blattman 2013). According to these studies, factors that increase the supply of children available for recruitment, such as rebel access to refugee camps and the number of displaced and orphaned children among the local population, increase the likelihood that rebels will recruit children for combat. Additionally, rising demand for child soldiers, which is often related to an insufficient supply of adult recruits, increases the prevalence of child soldiers. In a similar manner, scholars have also linked the balance of persuasion and coercion rebel movements employ to mobilize support and acquire recruits with variations in the intensity of the human resource demands they face (Eck 2014; Gates 2002; Leites and Wolfe 1970). Particularly, these studies suggest that rebels increasingly replace voluntary appeals for support with more coercive tactics as the demand for new recruits outstrips their ready supply.

Scholars have also recently begun employing aspects of this framework to better understand women’s mobilization for armed conflict. In the context of female recruitment, supply represents the available population of women who would willingly respond to the group’s offer of membership, while demand reflects the rebel leadership’s willingness or desire to create opportunities for women to participate in the armed movement as combatants. Broadly speaking, most research investigating the conditions that encourage women to join an armed group directly or indirectly addresses the supply-side factors associated with female recruitment. Such studies have, for example, found that women’s exposure to state-sponsored violence (especially sexual violence) and their subsequent desire for security or revenge (Bloom 2011; Speckhard 2008; Viterna 2013); the role of prevailing gender norms and women’s prewar participation in social, economic, and political processes (Reif 1986; Thomas and Wood 2018); women’s previous involvement in activist networks (Eggert 2018, 11; Kampwirth 2001; Mason 1992; Viterna 2006); and the appeal of revolutionary or gender-inclusive political ideologies (Kampwirth 2001; Molyneux 1985) serve as important supply-side factors explaining women’s participation in armed groups.

These analyses have produced valuable insights about the dynamics of female recruitment. However, as Thomas and Bond (2015, 488–489) contend, existing scholarship on female fighters has disproportionally focused on supply-side factors and has often ignored or downplayed the central role that demand-side factors play in determining the presence of women’s participation in rebel and terrorist organizations. In their effort to examine the role of demand-side factors, Thomas and Bond therefore focus on understanding organizational preferences regarding gender diversity in the ranks and seek to identify the group-level characteristics that encourage or discourage the recruitment of women and their deployment in combat. Ultimately, they conclude that the perceived tactical advantages of using female combatants (e.g., in terror attacks), whether the group embraces a gender-inclusive ideology, and the leadership’s assessment of the potential threat female recruits pose to group cohesion and public support influence the group’s demand for female combatants. Moreover, they assert that such demand-side factors have more explanatory power than many common supply-side factors.

Following these insights, my theory privileges the role of demand-side factors in explaining the mobilization of women for war. I focus primarily on demand-side factors for two specific reasons. First, as I discussed in the introductory chapter, anecdotal evidence suggests that even in societies characterized by strict gender-based divisions of labor and the presence of rigid gender norms, a subset of the female population is willing to take up arms on behalf of an armed movement provided they are given the opportunity. This appears to be the case even for groups whose beliefs contradict liberal notions of women’s rights and gender equality. For instance, substantial numbers of women have volunteered to fight on behalf of radical Islamist groups such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Shabaab, the Tehrik-i-Taliban, and (recently) ISIS. Substantial numbers of women have also fought on behalf of a wide variety of other violent movements that made no explicit appeals to gender equality or women’s rights, including the PIRA in Northern Ireland, the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG), Chechen insurgents in Russia, and the National Resistance Army (NRA) in Uganda. That women were willing to mobilize in support of these groups, and in some cases risk their lives in combat, implies that locating a supply of potential female recruits seldom represents an acute problem for rebel movements.

Second, the availability of opportunities for women to (formally) participate in organized political violence is inextricably linked to rebel leaders’ willingness to create those opportunities (Thomas and Bond 2015, 489). Regardless of the willingness of a subset of the population to participate in armed rebellion, the organization’s leadership maintains ultimate authority over the recruitment strategy it pursues, including how it defines its pool of potential recruits and whom it ultimately accepts into the movement (see Weinstein 2007). The leadership likewise determines the specific tasks recruits undertake, the roles they occupy in the movement, and their ability to advance in the ranks. As I discussed previously, in many (if not most) rebel organizations, women are either confined to noncombat support roles or completely absent. This implies that rebel leaders often eschew female recruits or restrict their participation to noncombat roles even when some subset of the female population is willing to fight and die on their behalf.

Acknowledging the leadership’s authority over the group’s recruitment decisions minimizes but does not eliminate the influence of supply-side factors in determining the prevalence of female combatants.1 Nor does prioritizing leader strategy formation imply that women are denied agency in the recruitment process. Where recruitment is a nominally voluntary process, I view female potential recruits as agentic actors whose willingness to participate in armed rebellion is shaped by their individual beliefs, preferences, and experiences. Thus, as with male recruits, factors such as prewar political engagement, war-related grievances, and patterns of interaction with armed actors influence their decision to participate (Viterna 2006, 2013). Moreover, where substantial numbers of women have successfully gained entry to armed groups, they have sometimes successfully influenced the group’s strategies and goals. For example, Jennifer Eggert (2018) contends that the presence of female fighters in many of the armed groups in the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s and 1980s was a direct result of women’s efforts to lobby rebel leaders to include them. Anecdotal evidence from numerous other rebellions, including the Sandinista Revolution, Mozambican Independence War, Zimbabwean War of Liberation, and Sri Lankan Civil War, similarly demonstrates that once admitted to the movement women have persuaded reluctant rebel leaders to expand women’s roles and responsibilities, including allowing them participate in combat or assume leadership roles (C. Johnson 1992, 160–161; Luciak 2001a; Lyons 2004, 109–110; Stack-O’Connor 2007b, 97–98).

Similarly, while rebel leaders routinely subordinate women’s interests and issues, the extent to which the group relies on female combatants may determine whether or not the advancement of women’s rights becomes a central part of the rebel group’s political platform. For example, as female participation in the PKK increased in the early 1990s, the group’s attention to issues of women’s rights and their oppressed status in the Kurdish community increases as well (see van Bruinessen 2001, 105–106; White 2015, 146–149). As these examples illustrate, even though the leadership retains ultimate discretion over women’s entry into the movement and the roles they play, women are sometimes able to successfully advance their collective interests within the organization, particularly when the organization relies heavily on their labor and their support.

The key benefit of the framework discussed above is that it permits me to theorize directly about rebel strategy formation. I focus explicitly on the decision-making processes of rebel leaders in order to identify the conditions under which rebel leaders are more likely to perceive that the benefits to recruiting, arming, and deploying women in combat roles outweigh the attendant costs of their inclusion in the armed wing of the unit. I view the recruitment of female combatants as a strategic decision; moreover, it represents only one of multiple potential resource mobilization strategies available to rebel leaders. Whether or not rebel leaders ultimately adopt this strategy depends on the intensity of the demand for such troops and the potential costs they expect to incur from adopting this strategy.

Resource Demands and Female Recruitment

While firms in competitive markets typically respond to increases in labor demands by offering higher wages, the asymmetric nature of internal armed conflict as well as the high risks associated with joining an armed rebellion often inhibit rebel ability to offer sufficient material incentives to address conditions of excess demand. Because the inability to address human resource shortages jeopardizes group survival and diminishes the odds of success, rebel leaders often adopt alternative strategies to address recruitment shortfalls. When conditions of labor scarcity prevail, rebels become more likely to adopt violence and forcible recruitment strategies to acquire necessary resource inputs (see Andvig and Gates 2010; Eck 2014; R. Wood 2014). Violent mobilization strategies, including gunpoint recruitment, abductions, and press-ganging, are indeed a common feature of contemporary internal conflicts (see Cohen 2013a). However, they do not represent the only strategies through which rebels seek to remedy human resource shortfalls; nor are they necessarily the preferred strategies of most groups. Locating alternatives to forcible recruitment may be particularly desirable given that overreliance on such strategies invites international condemnation and costly sanctions that might ultimately impede the group’s ability to achieve its political and military objectives (see Jo 2015).2

An alternative strategy available to many rebel organizations involves redefining the pool of potential recruits and extending opportunities to new groups or subpopulations that the leadership had previously overlooked or intentionally excluded from participation. While rebel leaders might appear to have only minimal ability to manipulate the supply of potential recruits, the historical record demonstrates that state militaries and rebel organizations have often sought to redraw the boundaries separating acceptable and less acceptable recruits. These efforts typically become more common as conflicts drag on and resource demands increase. For example, during World War I the U.S. government initially required all male citizens between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one to register for the draft but later expanded this requirement to the ages of eighteen to forty-five.3 Similarly, acute manpower shortages during the brutal Iran-Iraq War led the Iranian government to call both adolescent boys and elderly men (though mostly the former) into military service (Singer 2006, 22). Military leaders typically exclude children and adolescents from their primary recruitment pool, both because they are widely perce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Why Rebels Mobilize Women for War
• 2. The Strategic Implications of Female Fighters
• 3. Female Combatants in Three Civil Wars
• 4. Empirical Evaluation of Female Combatant Prevalence
• 5. Empirical Evaluation of the Effects of Female Combatants
• Conclusion: Understanding Women’s Participation in Armed Resistance
• Appendix A: Version History
• Appendix B: Examples of Coding Narratives from WARD
• Appendix C: Survey Wording and Instrument
• Notes
• References
• Index