Female fighters shooting back: representation and filmmaking in post-conflict societies

ABSTRACT

Despite the fascination with female fighters in the international media, there is still limited knowledge about how female combatants see themselves and how their conflict experiences shape their lives after war. Women’s participation in armed conflict is often dismissed and depoliticized, emphasizing either their role as victims or as peacemakers. This article contributes to a body of literature that foregrounds the diverse voices of ex-combatant women, as a particular group who challenged traditional gender norms during conflict. Their narratives complicate the simplistic and limited depictions of female combatants and instead reveal a multi-layered and complex account of how communities of female ex-combatants frame their wartime experiences and daily lives today. The article proposes participatory documentary filmmaking as a feminist method to make female combatants’ experiences in conflict visible without extracting knowledge or speaking on their behalf. Working with two ex-combatant women from non-state armed movements in Aceh (Indonesia) and Burundi as co-researchers who collected and curated the stories of their former comrades on camera means that a more diverse and personal picture emerges. This article highlights the challenges, complexities, and possibilities of participatory filmmaking as an approach that can enrich the methodological toolkit of scholars researching women in conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• Female combatants
• participatory filmmaking
• ethics in fieldwork
• Aceh
• Burundi

Acknowledgments

Thank you to all the women who participated in this study, and Shadia Marhaban, Rizki Affiat, and Leela Sharma for their thoughts and insights. Thank you to CEDAC in Burundi, Grace Nitunga, Eric Niragira, Salawati Pd., Véronique Dudouet, Beatrix Austin, Tim Jan Roetmann, Stina Lundström, and Victoria Cochrane-Buchmüller. Thank you also to GIZ and the Berghof Foundation for providing funding and connecting me with ex-combatant networks in Aceh. I am most grateful to Ida Danewid, Lisa Bogerts, and Nicola Degli Esposti for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Special thanks to the two anonymous reviewers and the editors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Scholars such as Cronin-Furman and Lake (2018) and Parkinson (2019) have further problematized the role of Global North researchers in conflict contexts and environments of extreme state weakness.

2 Participatory filmmaking as a method has also been used in anthropological work, media and communication studies, and some development studies research; see, for example, Kindon (2003), White (2003), and Cooke, Dennison, and Gould (2018).

3 If Aceh does receive global attention, it is usually for human rights violations resulting from the implementation of Sharia law in the province. In the case of Burundi, the elections in May 2020 were at the center of international attention.

4 In order to register as a political party in 2008, the PALIPEHUTU-FNL had to drop the reference to the ethnic group from their name as it is unconstitutional in Burundi, and so it was renamed the FNL.

5 The CNDD-FDD was the most significant group in Burundi. Smaller groups and CNDD splinters, such as the FNL and the FNL-Icanzo, signed peace agreements and demobilized a few years later.

6 Female combatants are much less likely to participate in DDR programs than their male peers since they are often in support roles, they often do not have their own weapon (some DDR programs require proof of combatant status by handing in a weapon), and the stigma attached to combatant life is higher for women (Fuhlrott 2007; Willems, Kleingeld, and van Leeuwen 2010).

7 All names of the interview participants were changed.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and Berghof Foundation Operations gGmbH.

Notes on contributors

Evelyn Pauls

Evelyn Pauls is the Impact Manager of the UKRI GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security. She was previously a researcher at the Berghof Foundation, working on the long-term reintegration of female ex-combatants. She was previously a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore and the Editor of Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 45, which includes the award-winning special issue “Racialized Realities in World Politics.”