Gendering Mobilization: Women’s Participation in the People’s War in Nepal

• In Event: Gender and Violence in South Asia

Abstract

Over 30% of rebel groups worldwide have dedicated women's wings. Yet, research on violent mobilization, even when focused on women's mobilization, has rarely engaged with and theorized about how these gendered organizational structures shape the timing, intensity and trajectories of women’s mobilization during rebellion. This article highlights the critical role women's wings play in organizing ordinary women, politicizing them and funneling them into highly transgressive and risky roles like combat. It shows how women’s wings create new networks, understandings and solidarity among women, endogenously generating conditions that enable ordinary women to transgress deeply entrenched gender norms and mobilize as fighters as conflict dynamics and related threats of violence shift. Examining within-case, over-time variation in patterns of women’s mobilization during different stages of the People’s War in Nepal (1996-2006), this article advances a dynamic and temporal theory of women’s mobilization. To do so, the article draws on multi-year, multi-sited fieldwork with former Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) rebels across Nepal. Analysis of 184 in-depth interviews with former rebels, participant observation in former rebel spaces, rebel documents, rebels’ diaries and memoirs and secondary sources form the basis of this analysis. This article advances our understanding of mobilization as a dynamic and gendered process shaped in important ways by the interaction of rebel organizational structures and patterns of violence.

Author

• Apekshya Prasai