Table Of ContentFemale Combatants After
Armed Struggle
This book stems from a simple ‘feminist curiosity’ that can be succinctly
summed up into a single question: what happens to combatant women after the
war? Based on in-d epth interviews with 40 research participants, mostly former
combatants within the Irish Republican Army (IRA), this book offers a critical
exploration of republican women and conflict transition in the North of Ireland.
Drawing on the feminist theory of a continuum of violence, this book finds
that the dichotomous separation of war and peace within conventional
approaches represents a gendered fiction. Despite undertaking wartime roles that
were empowering, agentic, and subversive, this book finds that the ‘post- conflict
moment’ as experienced by female combatants represents not peace and security,
but a continuity of gender discrimination, violence, injustice, and insecurity. The
experiences and perspectives contained in this book challenge the discursive
deployment of terms such as post-c onflict, peace, and security, and moreover,
shed light on the many forms of post-w ar activism undertaken by combatant
women in pursuit of peace, equality, and security.
The book represents an important intervention in the field of gender, political
violence, and peace, and more specifically, female combatants and conflict trans-
ition. It is analytically significant in its exploration of the ways in which gender
operates within non-s tate military movements emerging from conflict and will
be of interest to students and scholars alike.
Niall Gilmartin is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of
Dublin, Trinity College, Ireland.
Routledge Studies in Gender and Global Politics
Series Editor: Laura J. Shepherd
UNSW Australia
This series aims to publish books that work with, and through, feminist insights
on global politics, and illuminate the ways in which gender functions not just as
a marker of identity but also as a constitutive logic in global political practices.
The series welcomes scholarship on any aspect of global political practices,
broadly conceived, that pays attention to the ways in which gender is central to,
(re)produced in, and is productive of, such practices.
There is growing recognition both within the academy and in global political
institutions that gender matters in and to the practices of global politics. From
the governance of peace and security, to the provision of funds for development
initiatives, via transnational advocacy networks linked through strategic engage-
ment with new forms of media, these processes have a gendered dimension that
is made visible through empirically grounded and theoretically sophisticated
feminist work.
Human Capital in Gender and Development
Sydney Calkin
Women, Global Protest Movements and Political Agency
Rethinking the Legacy of 1968
Edited by Sarah Colvin and Katharina Karcher
Gender, Emancipation, and Political Violence
Rethinking the Legacy of 1968
Edited by Sarah Colvin and Katharina Karcher
Gendering Peace
UN Peacebuilding in Timor-L este
Sarah Smith
Female Combatants After Armed Struggle
Lost in Transition?
Niall Gilmartin
Female Combatants After
Armed Struggle
Lost in Transition?
Niall Gilmartin
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Niall Gilmartin
The right of Niall Gilmartin to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-415-78637-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-31522-769-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd. Boldon, Tyne and Wear
For Ann- Marie, Beth, Anna, and Clara.
Contents
Foreword viii
Acknowledgements x
1 Introduction 1
2 Who fought the war? The gendered constructions of
soldiering roles in post-w ar commemorative processes 40
3 Gendering the post-c onflict narrative 73
4 From the front lines of war to the sidelines of peace?
Republican women and the Irish peace process 113
5 Beyond regression: change and continuity in women’s
post- war activism 151
6 Conclusion 177
Index 189
Foreword
We’re all trying to figure it out. We read between the lines of seemingly bland
documents. We avidly digest each other’s newest reports and studies, often in
their still-i n-progress drafts. We exchange observations, usually with a healthy
dose of irreverence. We grab time during official debates to trade hunches and
tactics in the corridors of hotels and agencies. We cobble together travel funds
so that we can meet together in Geneva or Sarajevo or New York to hold day-
long conferences about it.
The specific ‘it’ is the exclusion of women – especially combatant women
and civil society activist women (both) – from wartime peace negotiations. The
larger ‘it’ is the marginalisation of diverse, knowledgeable local women from
the deals that will structure rebuilding a war-t orn society after the formal peace
agreement is signed by the men with guns.
I’ve been reading Niall Gilmartin’s engaging book with these intense conver-
sations at the front of my mind. Female Combatants After Armed Conflict makes
an important contribution to this on-g oing transnational urgent conversation. As
you read the pages that follow, think of what they mean for women in Yemen
today, for women in Ukraine, South Sudan, and, of course, Syria today. Think
what Gilmartin’s findings mean for women strategising and organising in post-
war Bosnia, Guatemala, and Sri Lanka today. Niall Gilmartin and the women
whose voices you will be carefully listening to in these chapters are hoisting a
bright neon yellow feminist flag of warning over every supposedly effective and
blatantly ineffective peace political process and post- war political process that
does not include women and that does not take seriously women’s experiences,
women’s needs, and women’s ideas.
Female Combatants After Armed Struggle is based on Niall Gilmartin’s
extensive and sensitive in- depth interviews with women who were directly
involved with the nationalist armed groups during the three long decades of
Northern Ireland’s armed conflict, a conflict that allegedly ended with the
signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Many of these women, not surprisingly, did not want to talk to him. It may
have been more than ten years since they put down their arms. By the time Gil-
martin introduced himself to them, these women were leading quite different
lives than those they led when they were combatants during ‘the Troubles’.
Foreword ix
Those changes, however, did not mean these women’s wars were over. Those
changes in the surface of their lives did not mean they easily could trust a
stranger with their personal wartime experiences and their candid thoughts about
the workings of sexism in post- war life.
Thus, among the several notable aspects of this book is its tracing the build-
ing, the slow, step by uneasy step building trust. It is the foundation on which
this book rests. Anyone planning to interview women in any war zone or in any
country haltingly recovering from armed violence would do well to read Niall
Gilmartin’s book – slowly.
Cynthia Enloe
Clark University, USA
