Description
How does everyday gendered labour transform under conditions of political instability, and who benefits from its rearticulation? Conflict studies have extensively examined rebel feasibility through macro-level dimensions rather than the mundane processes that reproduce notions of control, resistance and legitimacy. Simultaneously, feminist and Marxist scholarship has long emphasised the centrality of social reproduction to political and economic life, but has rarely examined how these processes are transformed during armed conflict. Drawing on comparative analysis of truth commission archives in Peru and Colombia, this paper conceptualises social reproduction as a key site of political contestation wherein armed actors seek to establish legitimacy and social control. Rebel groups across conflicts intervene in systems of social reproduction through extraction of domestic labour, regulation of women’s everyday lives and the disruption of communities’ capacities to sustain themselves during violent constraints. These are often insidious social processes that destabilise social fabrics without resisting traditional gendered norms. At the same time, analysis reveals how women are often truncated as victims and negotiators of anticipatory harms and ongoing depletion, while also mobilising collective forms of care and mutual aid to reproduce life under epochs of strife. Ultimately, I argue that social reproduction constitutes a critical but overlooked dimension of armed group social control. By shifting attention from extant theories of territoriality and external structures towards the organisation of everyday life-making and destroying, it contributes to emerging research on rebel governance, gendered violence and political violence more broadly.