This book explores women’s militant activities in insurgent wars and seeks to understand what women ‘do’ in wars. In International Relations, inter-state conflict, anti-state armed insurgency and armed militancy are essentially seen as wars where collective violence (against civilians and security forces) is used to achieve political objectives. Extending the notion of war as ‘politics of injury' to the armed militancy in Indian administered Kashmir and the Tamil armed insurgency in Sri Lanka, 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 book offer new comparative insight into two different and most prevalent forms of insurgent wars today: religio-political and ethno-nationalist. Empirical analyses of women’s roles in the Sri Lankan Tamil militant group, the LTTE and the logistical, ideological support women provide to militant groups active in Indian administered Kashmir suggest that these insurgent wars have their own gender dynamics in recruitment and operational strategies. Thus, Women and Militant Wars provides an excellent insight into the gender politics of these insurgencies and women’s roles and experiences within them. This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of critical war and security studies, feminist international relations, gender studies, terrorism and political violence, South Asia studies and IR in general.

Jean Elshtain examines how the myths of Man as "Just Warrior" and Woman as "Beautiful Soul" serve to recreate and secure women's social position as noncombatants and men's identity as warriors. Elshtain demonstrates how these myths are undermined by the reality of female bellicosity and sacrificial male love, as well as the moral imperatives of just wars.

A fascinating examination of the ambitions and friendships of a talented group of midcentury women artists Farewell to the Muse documents what it meant to be young, ambitious, and female in the context of an avant-garde movement defined by celebrated men whose backgrounds were often quite different from those of their younger lovers and companions. Focusing on the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Whitney Chadwick charts five female friendships among the Surrealists to show how Surrealism, female friendship, and the experiences of war, loss, and trauma shaped individual women’s transitions from someone else’s muse to mature artists in their own right. Her vivid account includes the fascinating story of Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe in occupied Jersey, as well as the experiences of Lee Miller and Valentine Penrose at the front line. Chadwick draws on personal correspondence between women, including the extraordinary letters between Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini during the months following the arrest and imprisonment of Carrington’s lover Max Ernst and the letter Frida Kahlo shared with her friend and lover Jacqueline Lamba years after it was written in the late 1930s. This history brings a new perspective to the political context of Surrealism as well as fresh insights on the vital importance of female friendship to its progress.

In the last decade the world has witnessed a rise in women's participation in terrorism. Women, Gender, and Terrorism explores women's relationship with terrorism, with a keen eye on the political, gender, racial, and cultural dynamics of the contemporary world. Throughout most of the twentieth century, it was rare to hear about women terrorists. In the new millennium, however, women have increas­ingly taken active roles in carrying out suicide bombings, hijacking air­planes, and taking hostages in such places as Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, and Chechnya. These women terrorists have been the subject of a substantial amount of media and scholarly attention, but the analysis of women, gender, and terrorism has been sparse and riddled with stereotypical thinking about women's capabilities and motivations. In the first section of this volume, contributors offer an overview of women's participation in and relationships with contemporary terrorism, and a historical chapter traces their involvement in the politics and conflicts of Islamic societies. The next section includes empirical and theoretical analysis of terrorist movements in Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, and Sri Lanka. The third section turns to women's involvement in al Qaeda and includes critical interrogations of the gendered media and the scholarly presentations of those women. The conclusion offers ways to further explore the subject of gender and terrorism based on the contributions made to the volume. Contributors to Women, Gender, and Terrorism expand our understanding of terrorism, one of the most troubling and complicated facets of the modern world.

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments 1: The Context of the World War II Mothers' Movement 2: Elizabeth Dilling and the Genesis of a Movement 3: The Fifth Column 4: The National Legion of Mothers of America 5: Cathrine Curtis and the Women's National Committee to Keep the U.S. Out of War 6: Dilling and the Crusade against Lend-Lease 7: Lyrl Clark Van Hyning and We the Mothers Mobilize for America 8: The Mothers' Movement in the Midwest: Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Detroit9: The Mothers' Movement in the East: Philadelphia and New York 10: Agnes Waters: The Lone Wolf of Dissent 11: The Mass Sedition Trial12: The Postwar Mothers' Movement 13: The Significance of the Mothers' Movement Epilogue: "Can We All Get Along?" Notes Bibliographical Essay Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

The suffragette movement shattered the domestic tranquillity of Edwardian England. This book is an original and searching study of the formidable organization which led this campaign: the Women’s Social and Political Union. With the use of previously unpublished correspondence of Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, her colleagues and such political leaders as Asquith, Balfour and Lloyd George, the author views the development of ever more extreme and violent forms of militancy not as a series of amusing exploits and incidents but as the carefully calculated political strategy the suffragettes intended it to be. He examines the reasons for the remarkable effectiveness of militant tactics in making women’s enfranchisement a political issue of central importance, and shows why militancy failed to secure this right prior to the outbreak of war in August 1914. He assesses, too, the influence of the vast social and political changes wrought by the war on the ultimate success of the campaign in 1918.

Why do women go to war? Despite the reality that female combatants exist the world over, we still know relatively little about who these women are, what motivates them to take up arms, how they are utilized by armed groups, and what happens to them when war ends. This book uses three case studies to explore variation in women’s participation in nonstate armed groups in a range of contemporary political and social contexts: the civil war in Ukraine, the conflicts involving Kurdish groups in the Middle East, and the civil war in Colombia. In particular, the authors examine three important aspects of women’s participation in armed groups: mobilization, participation in combat, and conflict cessation. In doing so, they shed light on women’s pathways into and out of nonstate armed groups. They also address the implications of women’s participation in these conflicts for policy, including postconflict programming. This is an accessible and timely work that will be a useful introduction to another side of contemporary conflict.

Amidst ongoing wars and insecurities, female fighters, politicians and activists of the Kurdish Freedom Movement are building a new political system that centres gender equality. Since the Rojava Revolution, the international focus has been especially on female fighters, a gaze that has often been essentialising and objectifying, brushing over a much more complex history of violence and resistance. Going beyond Orientalist tropes of the female freedom fighter, and the movement's own narrative of the 'free woman', Isabel Käser looks at personal trajectories and everyday processes of becoming a militant in this movement. Based on in-depth ethnographic research in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, with women politicians, martyr mothers and female fighters, she looks at how norms around gender and sexuality have been rewritten and how new meanings and practices have been assigned to women in the quest for Kurdish self-determination. Her book complicates prevailing notions of gender and war and creates a more nuanced understanding of the everyday embodied epistemologies of violence, conflict and resistance.

This edited volume provides a window on the many forces that structure and shape why women and girls participate in terrorism and militancy, as well as on how states have come to view, treat, and strategize against them. Females who carry out terrorist acts have historically been seen as mounting a challenge to the social order by violating conventional notions of gender and power, and their participation in such acts has tended to be viewed as being either as a passive victim or a feminist warrior. This volume seeks to move beyond these portrayals, to examine some of the structuring conditions that play a part in a girl or woman’s decision to commit violence. Amidst the contextual factors informing her involvement, the volume seeks also to explore the political agency of the female terrorist or militant. Several of the articles are based on research where authors had direct contact with female terrorists or militants who committed acts of political violence, or with witnesses to such acts.

The author of Emma’s War offers a compelling account of the link between Muslim women’s rights, Islamist opposition to the West, and the Global War on Terror. Wanted Women explores the experiences of two fascinating female champions from opposing sides of the conflict: Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali and neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui. With Emma’s War: An Aid Worker, A Warlord, Radical Islam and the Politics of Oil, journalist Deborah Scroggins achieved major international acclaim; now, in Wanted Women, Scroggins again exposes a crucial untold story from the center of an ongoing ideological war—laying bare the sexual and cultural stereotypes embraced by both sides of a conflict that threatens to engulf the world.