The intimate politics of insurgency

ABSTRACT

How is women’s engagement in armed insurgency shaped by intimacy? This article seeks to answer this question by exploring how political struggle for women is caught up in the entanglements of the intimate and the political. Drawing on fieldwork on the Bangsamoro conflict in Mindanao, Philippines, it analyzes four women’s stories about their trajectories as insurgents. Their accounts reveal that relational ties of kin, community, and marriage bound them to the insurgency and preceded ideological commitment; however, these relational ties also ruptured their involvement. Moreover, collective and personal closeness with war made political struggle an inevitable part of growing up and surviving. Contradictory commitments, dilemmas, and disruptions in their relational lives caused by critical events of conflict are read in the women’s political participation. The article’s conceptual answer is an intimate politics of insurgency, which underwrites women’s engagement and, more importantly, their maneuvers to fulfill conflicting political, ideological, relational, and gendered obligations. Intimate politics, I argue, brings attention to women’s work of unsettling and remaking boundaries between the intimate/private and the political/public, which allows them to reconcile continued political action and life as a whole inside conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• Intimate politics
• women insurgents
• maneuvers
• armed conflict
• Philippines

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The women’s names have been changed, and other sensitive information about their identity has been omitted for reasons of anonymity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sif Lehman Jensen

Sif Lehman Jensen has a PhD from the Department of Politics and Society at Aalborg University, Denmark, and her research focuses on violent conflicts and gender. This article is part of her PhD thesis, which examines how women negotiate and maneuver gender relations, family life, and armed conflict in the context of the Muslim insurgency in Mindanao. The PhD project is empirically founded on several rounds of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2018 among Muslim women in a number of different areas in the Philippines.