Aspectos a tener en cuenta para la formación de negociadores

This chapter has discussed epistemological and methodological issues pertaining to my research on armed political groups’ decision-making on the inclusion of female fighters. A discussion of the epistemology as well as the methodological approach was followed by sections on data collection, management and analysis. I discussed advantages and limitations of combining a positivist framework with qualitative methods and emphasised the importance of including interviewees from a variety of different backgrounds. The final sections of the chapter were dedicated to issues

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around research ethics and researcher reflexivity. I illustrated how, due to the specific post-war environment in Lebanon, gaining access to former members of most of the militias involved in the civil war was much easier than suggested in some of the literature on other armed groups and civil

wars. In each sub-section of the chapter, expected and actual problems were discussed and ways to overcome these were discussed. As with any research study, this project contains a number of limitations which were highlighted throughout the chapter. Overall, none of the identified issues were impossible to mitigate. However, it is essential to bear these methodological limitations in mind during the analysis of the findings of this study, which will be discussed in the following chapters.

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Chapter 4 | Individual motivations

The majority of existing publications on female involvement in non-state political violence focus on individual aspects. In the case of women’s participation during the Lebanese civil war, individual motivations were indeed crucial. Without the women’s insistence for their inclusion, it is highly unlikely that there would have been any female fighters in any of the militias operating during the Lebanese civil war. In this chapter, I illustrate the importance of women’s individual motivations to join the non-state armed groups. In Section One, I firstly look at debates surrounding the question of whether or not women’s participation is as a result of a self-determined and voluntary decision. I show that in the case of female fighters in the Lebanese civil war, coercion did not play a role. On the contrary, the women were highly motivated, and were it not for their insistence to be included in combat roles, the organisations would probably not have made the decision to let them participate. Secondly, I look at the backgrounds of the women (and men) who got involved in the various militias. Who are the women who decided to join the war? What are their backgrounds and what is it that made them want to actively participate in the civil war? Are there any differences between the different militia members’ motivations and were any of the motivations gender-specific? I examine these questions in Part

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Two and Three of this chapter. In previous literature on individual motivations in other violent conflicts, most authors stress the highly complex nature of the individual decision-making process and that it is difficult, if not impossible, to single out singular causes (Bloom, 2005: 162,

234-235, Berko and Erez, 2007b: 503, McKay, 2007: 171, Schweitzer, 2007: 143, Eager, 2008: 23, Alison, 2009: 128, Jacques and Taylor, 2009: 507, Shekhawat, 2012: 132). This is further complicated by the fact that motivations can of course, change over time (Bloom, 2005: 234-235). In the context of my research, most women (and men) identified political reasons as motivational factors for their involvement. However, as this chapter shows, other factors such as previous non-violent activism, age, marital status and personal links to militias, also played a role. Another factor worth mentioning in this context is that, whilst many individuals share the same experiences or attitudes, all of them do not get involved in political violence (Eager, 2008: 31). This is why “[e]xactly how individuals become terrorists [or involved in political violence more generally] can only usefully be appreciated on a case-by-case basis” (Galvin, 1983: 23, cit. in Eager, 2008: 4). It is also the reason why in this chapter, I not only discuss the motivations of women who decided to join as fighters, but also the reasons why other women in the same militias decided to contribute in non-combat roles instead. The focus on the individual level in the majority of existing conflict

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and terrorism studies literature does sometimes come at the price of more comprehensive approaches being shunned (Haen Marshall et al., 1986: 22, cit. in Hamilton, 2007: 133, see also O'Rourke, 2009: 683). Particularly in the field of terrorism studies, there is a history of analysing individual features

with attempts to identify common “terrorist profiles” – as though other, non-individual, factors do not play a role in processes of involvement in political violence. In order to avoid this pitfall, I integrate the role of the security context, organisational aspects and societal factors into this chapter, by examining in Sections Four, Five and Six how each of these factors influenced women’s motivations.

4.1 | Choice or coercion?

Is female involvement with non-state armed groups a choice women make or is it more accurate to speak of coercion? Claims of coercion can often be found in conflict studies literature focusing on Africa, and to a lesser degree, Asia and South America (Eager, 2008: 128, Alison, 2009: 139-141, Parashar, 2009: 137, Katto, 2014: 544). According to some scholars, in some conflict contexts, the majority of female fighters were either abducted or born to an abducted mother (McKay, 2007: 171, see also Coulter, 2008: 55). On the other hand, it has been contended that the majority of women joining armed

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groups worldwide volunteer (Speckhard, 2008: 1018, Henshaw, 2015: 3). Henshaw in particular, criticises the focus on the use of force as a tool for recruitment and retention for women. She notes the “difficulty that many observers have reconciling women as willing participants in violent activity”,

and criticises what she calls the “dichotomous notion of agency that oversimplifies the realities of conflict”, by pointing to the cases of women who are coerced to join and then decide to stay (Henshaw, 2015: 14, see also Coulter, 2008: 55). Others have questioned the degree to which a decision made by a forced member of a violent group can be considered voluntary and self-determined, which is why Coulter, for example, speaks of “choiceless decisions” in this context (Coulter, 2008: 61). She contends that this is a situation both men and women find themselves in, but adds that women’s struggle is often harder as they tend to face more barriers (Coulter, 2008: 68). The situation is further complicated by the fact that the distinction between coercion and choice “is not always clear-cut and shades of grey proliferate. The spectrum of coercion includes everything from subtle community pressure to brute force” (Bloom, 2005: 234). However, in the case of militias operating during the Lebanese civil war, direct coercion did not play a role. Whenever the role of the militias in the recruitment process came up, it was stressed that “the choice is with the woman” (interviewee 57; see also interviewees 22, 27, 52).

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A lesser form of the coercion argument is the belief that organisations lure women in by making false promises, or by hiding the true nature of the group’s or its members’ motives and activities. The women, in this explanation, are naïve, vulnerable, indoctrinated, mentally disturbed or do

not fully grasp what they are doing. Their agency is reduced to a minimum. This explanation can mostly be found in terrorism studies (Bloom, 2005: 234- 235, Berko and Erez, 2007b: 505-506, Speckhard, 2008: 1018, Speckhard and Akhmedova, 2008: 106, 115). In these publications, it is often assumed that women are lured in by men (Berko and Erez, 2007b: 503), which reproduces problematic gender stereotypes of men as active perpetrators and women as passive victims. Moreover, the focus on women being the subject of manipulation is striking. It stands in contrast to the findings of a number of scholars working on the topic, who have pointed out that it is both men and women who are being used and exploited by military groups (Schweitzer, 2007: 143).

Attempts to explain female participation in combat through either coercion or by being lured in by men have been strongly contested by a number of researchers, who instead point to the women’s high motivation to join as fighters (Hamilton, 2007: 145). Some have questioned the conceptualisation of “recruitment as a top-down process in which recruiters identify susceptible potentials and coerce them into joining their organization”

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(Jacques and Taylor, 2008: 308). Instead, they stress the crucial role women pushing for their inclusion plays, and describe recruitment as a reactive process (Jacques and Taylor, 2008: 308). This mirrors the findings of this research study. Several interviewees stressed that recruitment of female

fighters was a bottom-up process. This was emphasised by a former fighter with leftist and Palestinian groups who stated: “No, it wasn’t that they [the Christian militias] hired women, the women came to them. It was the same for us [members of the Lebanese National Movement]. This is a very important point” (interviewee 14). A former female fighter with the LCP, described a similar process looking back on her experience: “When the war started I was ready. The war started, I was a friend of the Communist Party, so I went there and said I wanted to enrol” (interviewee 31). Almost all interviewees stressed the high motivation of female combatants to join the fight (interviewees 1, 2, 6, 8, 11, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 44, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66; see also Bechara, 2003, Sneifer, 2006, Duplan and Raulin, 2012, El-Murr, 2014). Women joining the fight were described as having a “clear vision” of what they wanted (interviewee 27), as being “very committed” (interviewee 56) and “serious about joining” (interviewee 54). One former military commander commented that “when the young women came to us, it was not to sit on the phone” but to fight (interviewee 60). Another described how in the war, you could see women

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fighting who “couldn’t even handle a gun” properly, but who were so determined to contribute to the fight that they wanted to participate anyway (interviewee 32).

In existing literature, it has been claimed that even in cases where the

leadership of an organisation was initially reluctant to include female fighters in combat, women were “eventually accepted through their own persistence” (Bloom, 2005: 130, 244, Bernal, 2006: 133, Alison, 2009: 124- 125). Examples of violent political groups, in which women’s insistence on being fully included was at least partially decisive in women’s later involvement, include organisations as diverse as the Sri Lankan LTTE (Alison, 2009: 124-125), Eritrean EPLF (Bernal, 2000: 63), different armed Palestinian groups (Bloom, 2005: 130, Berko and Erez, 2007b: 504), Irish Republican groups (Bloom, 2005: 244), the Mozambican FRELIMO (Katto, 2014: 542- 543), Namibian PLAN (Shikola, 1998: 139) and the Western Somali Liberation Front (Van Hauwermeiren, 2012: 22). This was also the case during the Lebanese civil war where the door for female fighters was opened after women’s insistence to be included. Several interviewees described this as the women “pushing” for their inclusion (interviewee 11), and “imposing” themselves (interviewees 7, 11, 65). Moreover, many interviewees stressed that it was the women demanding to be given a more active role in the fight (interviewees 7, 11, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 44, 45,

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47, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69; see also Duplan and Raulin, 2015: 54-55). In some cases, this determination went so far that the women participated against the explicit wish of their families (interviewees 57, 64, Duplan and Raulin 2015: 62). However, some of the interviewees also

recalled accepting the non-combat roles they were allocated – which they considered to be of equal importance, rather than insisting to be included as actual fighters (interviewees 30, 52). Amongst the women wanting to fight, some were so motivated that they found ways to become combatants even if the organisation denied them entry as fighters (as was the case with the PSP) (interviewees 9, 10, 51). Their strategy was not getting married to a male fighter (as in the Khalistani armed groups Laurent Gayer analysed) (Gayer, 2009: 7), but instead, they formed their own independent combat unit in the Matn – a district in the mountains near Beirut (interviewees 9, 10, 51).

Rather than coercion, it was the women’s high motivations and their insistence on being included that constituted the first step towards their participation in combat during the Lebanese civil war. But who were these women and how can their extremely high motivations be explained? Did their personal backgrounds have an impact on their motivations? This will be explored in the following sections.

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