Description
How do periods of conflict impact societal gender relations and to what extent do insurgents shape this process? Recent studies have demonstrated the complex gendered aftereffects of civil war, noting legacies of trauma as well as windows of opportunity for women’s political and social participation (Hughes & Tripp, 2015; Viterna, 2013). Yet rebel challenges to societal gender norms are often overlooked as a factor shaping post-conflict gender relations. Using an original dataset of 137 armed groups fighting between 1950 and 2019, I find that 40% of rebel groups challenge civilian gender norms in the territories they govern during wartime. I then combine this original data with in-depth qualitative case studies of Eritrea, South Sudan and Zimbabwe to examine the legacies of this process in the post-war period. Overall, I find that rebel groups subvert local gender norms as a means to destabilize entrenched local elites and solidify social dominance both during and in the aftermath of armed conflicts, contributing to a growing literature on the strategic instrumentalization of women’s empowerment (Arat, 2022; Berry and Lake 2021).
