Women Combatants and the Politics of Gender-Based Repression in the Syrian Conflict
Anita Gohdes
Assistant Professor, University of Zurich
Abstract:
Conventional wisdom holds that governments, when faced with challenges to their political authority in civil conflict, will target military-aged men at a higher rate than other civilians to reduce the supply of fresh rebel recruits. Yet research on the involvement of female combatants in fighting has fundamentally challenged the idea that women don’t participate in the production of violence. In the ongoing Syrian conflict, the crucial involvement of women combatants in the Kurdish armed forces has gained much attention, while other armed groups involved in the conflict have few to no women participating in active combat. This paper explores how variation in the involvement of women combatants in fighting is linked to the active targeting of women civilians in the Syrian conflict, assuming that the presence of women fighters affects the threat perception the government has of civilian women. Drawing on a new database of more than 80,000 killings perpetrated by the Syrian Regime between July 2013 and December 2015, and newly collected data on armed group presence in Syria, the paper analyses whether the targeting of civilian women through Regime forces is affected by the presence and strength of Kurdish forces. The results demonstrate that although aggregate patterns of civilian targeting clearly show civilian men being the primary target of Syrian state violence, the presence of Kurdish fighters significantly increases both the proportion and absolute number of women non-combatants killed by the Regime.
Discussants:
Kristine Eck, Uppsala University
Kanisha Bond, University of Maryland
Alexis Henshaw, Miami University
OPSC Co-ordinator:
Emily Ritter, University of California Merced
Graduate Assistant:
Peter D. Carey II (University of California Merced)
