Description
Why do armed rebel organisations vary in the extent in which women participate in social reproductive labour, and what does this mean for their viability? Existing scholarship has shown that rebellions require non-militarised support apparatuses to persist, while women are disproportionately responsible for the labour that sustains them. Yet the relationship between these two insights has seldom been theorised systematically. This paper conceptualises social reproduction in armed conflict as the non-combat and non-militarised labour that enables rebellion to exist in the first place, encompassing tasks of both organisational and individual maintenance. Drawing on an original global dataset of 128 armed groups (SRARO), I evaluate how material endowments, rebel governance, and ideological imagination shape variation in women’s social reproduction. Cross-sectional quantitative analysis shows three broad patterns. Materially poorer groups are more likely to rely on women’s unpaid reproductive labour as a substitution for absent financial and resource prosperity. Second, armed groups that establish social rebel governance institutions depend on women’s labour in nurturing and caring roles to sustain service provision and garner popular support in the process. Lastly, rebel organisations that require the consistent propping of ideological imagination - using ideological appeals for continued feasibility - employ women’s reproductive labour to naturalise such social and collective notions of political values. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that women’s reproductive labour is not peripheral but central to rebel organising, providing systematic evidence that labour strategies are structured by the material, institutional, and ideological conditions under which groups operate. This study thus brings feminist theory into conversation with quantitative conflict research and offers a first step toward centring gendered divisions of labour in the study of rebellion.
