3 research outputs found
Framing the Narrative: Female Fighters, External Audience Attitudes, and Transnational Support for Armed Rebellions
Female combatants play a central role in rebel efforts to cultivate and disseminate positive narratives regarding the movement and its political goals. Yet, the effectiveness of such strategies in shaping audience attitudes or generating tangible benefits for the group remains unclear. We propose and test a theory regarding the channels through which female fighters advance rebel goals. We argue that female fighters positively influence audience attitudes toward rebel groups by strengthening observers’ beliefs about their legitimacy and their decision to use armed tactics. We further contend that these effects directly help them secure support from transnational non-state actors and indirectly promote state support. We assess our arguments by combining a novel survey experiment in two countries with analyses of new cross-national data on female combatants and information about transnational support for rebels. The empirical results support our arguments and demonstrate the impact of gender framing on rebel efforts to secure support
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Why Women Rebel: Understanding Female Participation in Intrastate Conflict
Studies indicating that women as leaders and negotiators have a pacifying effect on interstate conflict stand in contrast to the reality of women's active involvement in civil conflict through armed rebel groups and insurgencies. This dissertation seeks to provide insight into this apparent paradox by analyzing how and why women become involved in rebel groups, drawing on insights from feminist and IR theories to create a gendered theory of rebellion. Hypotheses developed from this theory are examined using new data on women's participation in rebel groups from 1990-2008. These tests are supplemented with qualitative analysis focusing on the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. Among the findings, data on rebel organizations in the post-Cold War era show that women are active in over half of all armed insurgencies, a level of activity much greater than what is recognized by current scholarship in international relations. The analysis also indicates that economic and ethnic- or religious-based grievance motivates women's participation, but disputes theories that portray rebels as profit- or power-seekers