The Role of Gender Politics in Rebel Governance

• In Event: Rebels and Cartels

Abstract

Interfering in community norms is a risky strategy for a leader in any situation. The precarity of civil conflict seems a particularly inopportune time to do so. Yet rebel groups frequently embark upon sweeping social reforms in the territories they control, challenging deeply embedded norms regarding marriage, kinship, intimacy and reproduction.

The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), while still embroiled in a brutal conflict, eliminated forced and child marriage, banned the payment of dowries, forbade the repudiation of nonvirgin brides, encouraged pre-marital sex and made contraceptives available (Ranchod-Nilsson 2006). They also transformed the land distribution system, providing women and marginalized groups with property rights. On the other end of the ideological spectrum Nigeria’s Boko Haram has also challenged societal gender norms in unexpected ways, paying dowries directly to women rather than their parents and providing property rights for widows (Matfess, 2017).

Existing research assumes that rebels invest in governance to enhance their military capacity or attract international legitimacy. If so, why would rebel groups devote precious time and resources to reshaping local gender relations, risking civilian backlash in the process?

This paper introduces the Gender and Rebel Governance dataset, a cross-national dataset documenting attempts to reshape local gender norms in 124 rebel groups fighting in civil conflicts between 1950 and 2020. I use this original data, combined with South Sudanese and Ethiopian case studies, to examine gender politics as a strategy of rebel governance at the local level. I argue that attempts to understand rebel group behavior must consider interactions with alternate power systems operating in parallel with the state system, particularly customary and religious figures who derive power from their control over kinship, intimacy and procreation. In doing so I draw upon a long line of feminist thought, arguing that gender norms are an arena of contestation for social control between the state and rival orders.

Rebel groups, independent of ideological leaning, have an interest in upsetting the existing social and political order while simultaneously seeking legitimacy from their own constituency, or the group they are fighting for. Gender politics, I argue, provides a means of balancing these contradictory demands, allowing rebel groups to consolidate their power at a local level while challenging rival forms of authority.

Author

• Tessa Devereaux Evans, Cornell