Women and Militant Wars

Swati Parashar

"This book explores women's activities in militant insurgencies and seeks to understand what women 'do' in wars and how that challenges or endorses gender norms, as the case might be. In mainstream IR, inter-state conflict, anti-state armed insurgency and armed militancy are essentially seen as wars where protracted collective violence (against civilians and security forces) is used to achieve a political goal. The case studies in this book are informed by Christine Sylvester's work suggesting that 'war is a politics of injury'. Extending this notion of wars to the armed militancy in Indian Kashmir, Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka and the Maoist insurgency in India, this book explores how women participate in militant wars, and how that politics not only shapes the gendered understandings of women's identities and bodies but is in turn shaped by them.The case studies discussed in the...