Gendered Patterns of Mobilization and Recruitment for Political Violence, Experiences from Three Latin American Countries

Citation:

Dietrich Ortega, Luisa Maria. 2012. “Gendered Patterns of Mobilization and Recruitment for Political Violence, Experiences from Three Latin American Countries.” In Understanding Collective Political Violence, 84–104. Conflict, Inequality and Ethnicity. Palgrave Macmillan: London.

Author: Luisa Maria Dietrich Ortega

Abstract:

Over the past decades a feminist perspective on international relations, security studies and conflict has broadened the scope of the field.¹ Troubled by the absence of women as research objects and subjects, feminist scholars have started to ask different questions and to employ alternative methodologies in order to unveil gendered distortions, namely, male bias and gender-neutral appearance. Both are inherent in the study of political violence and mobilization research. Male bias is deeply rooted in the study of political violence, which centres on male-connoted concepts such as nation-states, war, military and armed groups and predominantly male actors, such as presidents, soldiers, rebel leaders, presuming a connection between violence and masculinities. Thus, a worldview that equates male experiences to the norm continually reproduces a male value system that excludes women from conventional accounts of political violence and constructs a symbolic ‘woman’ as deviant from or in respect to male-as-norm criteria (Ackerly et al. 2006: 4; Peterson and True 1998: 15). Due to the absence of women from conflict narratives, the invisibility of gender regimes operating in the context of conflict, mainstream scholars maintain the normative fiction that conflicts are gender-free (Ní Aoláin and Rooney 2007: 342). (Abstract from Springer)

Topics: Armed Conflict, Combatants, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Gender Analysis, Violence, Weapons /Arms Regions: Americas, South America

Year: 2012