Women Combatants and Political Violence: Gender, agency and lived experience in women's narratives of war

Vestergaard, Anne

4. semester

International Relations, MSc.

2026

2026-05-29

This thesis investigates how women combatants experience and narrate their participation in armed conflict, focusing on their motivations, their use of violence, and the role gender plays in shaping these experiences and narratives. It compares two markedly different cases: American and British women soldiers in the War in Afghanistan and Kurdish fighters in the Syrian Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) during the Syrian civil war. Drawing on poststructuralist feminist theory, including Butler’s concepts of subjectivity and performativity, feminist International Relations understandings of war and violence as continua, and a relational, situated conception of agency, the study combines feminist narrative analysis with Lazar’s notion of disjunctive comparison. Empirically, the analysis is based on existing textual material that contains women’s own narratives or narrative fragments, such as war memoirs, journalist-authored books based on interviews, and online videos and news articles quoting women fighters. The findings show that women’s motivations for participating in war are diverse, complex and simultaneously personal and political, including patriotism, ideological commitment, family values, struggles for women’s liberation, socio-economic factors, the search for community, escape from violence and oppression, and simply enjoying the work. The analysis further demonstrates that the women both experience and narrate violence from overlapping positions as performers, victims and witnesses, challenging binary understandings of protection and victimhood. Through their narratives, they construct different gendered identities: US/UK soldiers often perform professional, masculinised soldier identities, while YPJ fighters articulate explicitly feminine warrior identities that cast women as protectors, defenders and avengers of the Kurdish people and land. The thesis shows that gender does not explain women’s violence, but it structures their experiences, shapes possibilities and constraints, and provides narrative resources through which war and violence gain meaning. It argues that women’s participation in war cannot be adequately understood through simple binaries such as personal/political, protector/protected or agency/victimhood; instead, centring women combatants’ own narratives reveals how they exercise situated and relational forms of agency within gendered relations of power, thereby contributing to feminist IR debates on women, violence and war and underscoring the importance of taking violent women’s voices seriously.

Denne afhandling undersøger, hvordan kvindelige kombattanter oplever og fortæller om deres deltagelse i væbnet konflikt, med fokus på deres motivationer, deres brug af vold og den rolle, som køn spiller i disse erfaringer og fortællinger. Studiet sammenligner to markant forskellige cases: amerikanske og britiske kvindelige soldater i Krigen i Afghanistan og kurdiske krigere i de syriske Kvinders Beskyttelsesenheder (YPJ) under den syriske borgerkrig. Med udgangspunkt i poststrukturalistisk feministisk teori, herunder Butlers begreber om subjektivitet og performativitet, feministisk IR-forståelse af krig og vold som kontinua samt en relationel og situeret forståelse af handlekraft, kombinerer afhandlingen feministisk narrativ analyse med Lázars begreb om disjunktiv komparation. Empirisk bygger analysen på eksisterende tekster, der indeholder kvinders egne fortællinger eller narrative fragmenter, såsom krigsmemoirer, journalistiske bøger baseret på interviews samt onlinevideoer og artikler med citater fra kvindelige krigere. Analysen viser, at kvindernes motivationer for at deltage i krig er mangfoldige, komplekse og både personlige og politiske, herunder patriotisme, ideologisk engagement, familieværdier, kamp for kvinders frigørelse, socioøkonomiske forhold, ønsket om fællesskab, flugt fra vold og undertrykkelse og et simpelt ønske om at kunne lide arbejdet. Samtidig fremgår det, at kvinderne både oplever og fortæller om vold fra overlappende positioner som udøvere, ofre og vidner, hvilket udfordrer binære forestillinger om beskyttelse og offerstatus. Gennem deres fortællinger konstruerer de forskellige former for kønnede identiteter: de amerikanske og britiske soldater fremfører ofte professionelle, maskuliniserede soldateridentiteter, mens YPJ-krigerne artikulerer eksplicit feminine krigeridentiteter, der fremstiller kvinder som beskyttere, forsvarere og hævnere for det kurdiske folk og land. Afhandlingen viser, at køn ikke kan forklare kvinders vold, men strukturerer deres erfaringer, skaber muligheder og begrænsninger og leverer narrative ressourcer, som giver krig og vold mening. Der argumenteres for, at kvinders deltagelse i krig ikke kan forstås gennem enkle binære modsætninger som personlig/politisk, beskytter/beskyttet eller handlekraft/offer, men bedre begribes ved at sætte kvindelige kombattanters egne fortællinger i centrum og synliggøre, hvordan de udøver situeret og relationel handlekraft inden for kønnede magtrelationer, hvilket bidrager til feministiske IR-debatter om kvinder, vold og krig og understreger betydningen af at tage voldelige kvinders stemmer alvorligt.

[This abstract has been generated with the help of AI directly from the project full text]

Women ; Combatants ; Soldiers ; Fighters ; War ; Violence ; Gender ; Agency ; Narrative ; Experience ; YPJ ; Kurds ; Syria ; Afghanistan

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