Female Ex-Combatants Belong in the Peace Process
The championing of women’s inclusion has a firm seat in the international discourse on peace. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 adopted in 2000 has put the gender perspective on the international community’s radar. The resolution ‘affirms the importance of the participation of women and the inclusion of gender perspectives in peace negotiations, humanitarian planning, peacekeeping operations, and post-conflict peacebuilding and governance’. It had a big impact on putting women’s issues on the peace agenda and an entire Women, Peace and Security Agenda emerged that concerns itself with the meaningful participation of women in peace processes.
Studies show us that women are affected by conflict differently than men are. So, the inclusion of women in the various phases of conflict resolution is intrinsically and practically essential to creating sustainable peace.
While the discourse on women’s inclusion in the peace process is salient, the actual inclusion of women is still lagging far behind. Between 1990 and 2017 women only made up 2 percent of mediators, 8 percent of negotiators, and 5 percent of signatories in major peace processes.
When we speak about the inclusion of women we also have to realise that women are not a monolith. The experiences of women during and after conflict vary. There are activists, survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, combatants, peacebuilders and many other women whose experiences cannot be thrown into one melting pot.
Female combatants are particularly overlooked in conflict resolution. They do not fit our gendered ideas that women are predominantly victims of conflict or that women are peace loving. This has at least partially led to the lack of consideration of how female ex-combatants may be included in peace processes and where they belong in post-conflict societies.
Female combatants are estimated to make up less than 2 per cent of combatants globally between 1990 and 2008. Yet women have made up significant numbers in many armed groups. Around 35 percent of Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units are estimated to be women. In the same region there also exists the Kurdish all-female militia Women’s Protection Unit. In Nepal women made up 30 percent of the People’s Liberation Army many of whom were combatants. 40 percent of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia consisted of women.
It is true that not all female combatants voluntarily join armed groups and many are forcibly recruited and suffer abuse within these groups. Yet for some, choosing to fight can be an empowering and transformative experience. A case study on the Maoist women in Nepal found that many women joined the Communist Party of Nepal as an opportunity to escape gender-based oppression including early and forced marriage, domestic violence, polygamy and tortuous rituals surrounding widowhood. Many women have taken leadership roles in armed groups. Kurdish female fighters in Syria claimed they fight not only to liberate themselves from ISIS, but also to liberate women in the region. Women fighting in Sri Lanka with the Tamil Tigers reported feeling they were treated equally as men.
What happens to these fighters when conflicts end?
Ex-combatants are generally treated with suspicion and regarded as security threats to post-conflict communities. They have been perpetrators of violence and communities often do not want to welcome them back. This in itself can lead to difficulties in rehabilitation and reintegration.
When it comes to female ex-combatants, there is also a huge conceptual gap on how conflict practitioners ought to deal with them in conflict resolution. Just recently there has been greater consideration for female combatants in the immediate post-conflict phase. For instance May 2018 the UN Secretary General launched an agenda for disarmament with direct consideration of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. Such efforts offer a starting point at trying to fill that conceptual gap, but overall they have not addressed female ex-combatant inclusion sufficiently. Ultimately, the international community has neglected to make sense of how to meaningfully include them in the peace process.
The consequences are that they are typically excluded from peace processes and marginalised in post-conflict societies. Female ex-combatant participation in negotiations, transitional justice, and disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes is minimal. Some attempts to include female ex-combatants have also been seriously flawed. Several DDR programmes have been operationalised with a lacking consideration for gender issues. They have often even promoted gender stereotypes and traditional gender roles by offering training for ‘female’ skills for economic reintegration such as cooking and tailoring. Upon return to their communities these women are stigmatised. They are expected to lay down their arms, to shed their past experiences of agency and decision-making, and to return to traditional gender roles.
Female ex-combatants belong in the peace process. Not only is a failure to reintegrate them dangerous as it increases the likelihood of a return to fighting but it also fails to address post-conflict gender inequality.
These women’s knowledge and experience from war-time will likely offer useful insight into how to address unequal gender structures in post-conflict societies. Their inclusion in negotiations could help address women’s needs and roles in post-conflict society. Female ex-combatants who have played leadership roles in rebel movements can share their knowledge on how to create gender inclusive and women empowering social structures and spaces. Female ex-combatants who have suffered sexual and gender-based violence within armed groups can help inform how to challenge patterns of sexual and gender-based violence within post-conflict communities. They have a wealth of experience that can be immensely valuable for transforming post-conflict societies to become more gender inclusive.
The current discourse and practice concerning women’s inclusion in peace processes needs to include female ex-combatants. Their visibility and equal and meaningful participation in conflict resolution should be supported.
