Female Ex-combatants and Political Militancy in Nepal and Colombia: Bodies, Spaces and Emotions

Purpose and goal

Female ex-combatants from leftist insurgencies tend to be portrayed as victims, expelling them from politics in their return to civil society. This project contests these narratives with a feminist analysis of female ex-guerrilla’s militancy in Nepal and Colombia. Drawing on Critical Peace Studies and Feminist Security Studies, it looks at (1) spatial and temporal aspects of female reintegration (2) their embodied and emotional processes (3) the comparatives dynamics of their political militancy (4) and possible policy-oriented recommendations from a feminist perspective.

Expected results and effects

The expected impacts are: (1) to build a theoretical framework for the analysis of female ex-combatants’ militancy after they reintegrate civil society; (2) to produce innovative methodologies and scientific and wide-audience content on the topic and; (3) to issue recommendations for the EU Action Plan and the United Nations Standards on Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration. Dissemination strategies targets scholars, practitioners and wide-audiences with deliverables such as conferences, podcasts, policy-briefs, peer-reviewed articles and cartoon booklets.

Planned approach and implementation

This 24-month project has four main set of activities: (1) fieldwork preparation and training in feminist methodologies (2) three months of fieldwork in Colombia and Nepal (3) data analysis and theoretical development (4) dissemination and communication activities. It is a multi-sited ethnographic research, adopting a feminist multimethodology including literature review, body map methods, biographical interviews and focus groups with 15 female ex-combatants as well as participant observation in both Nepal and Colombia.

External links

Link to the project updates on my personal website. Fundación Lüvo feminist and antiracist collective.