‘Like flesh and a nail’: rethinking the nexus of familial ties and armed conflict

What are the familial ties that are constituted through conditions of war? And how do these ties shape women’s participation in armed groups, in various forms? This article advances a feminist theorization of the critical nexus between family and armed conflict. Critical IR and feminist scholarship recognize that family sustains war symbolically and materially. Yet, what is missing is a theoretical conceptualization of the relationship between the diverse ties that constitute family in contexts of war and women’s participation in armed groups. To address this lacuna, we offer a new theoretical framework – of militarized familial ties – to capture precisely how familial ties shape, and are shaped by, women’s participation in fighting forces. We demonstrate the wider implications of our theoretical intervention by reflecting on long-term field research conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Nepal.

Militarized familial ties – theoretical framework

At its core, our framework views familial ties as distinctly affective bonds that both emerge and transform within – and through – armed conflict (Ketola, 2023). This framing allows us to demonstrate how familial ties can operate as a generative, rather than solely constraining, force which prompts and shapes women’s participation in fighting forces in distinct ways. The notion of ‘affective bonds’ captures the emotional investments in the lives of others and relationships to others, including the affective labour that is dedicated to sustaining such attachments (Chisholm and Ketola, 2020; Baines, 2016). We argue that familial ties matter for understanding armed conflict not only because family is a powerful social institution. They matter because the women who participate in armed groups continue to cultivate and affectively invest in these ties and the norms that structure them.

To explore the generative and transformative relationship between war’s violence and familial ties, we construct two frames. First, we use the frame of ‘familial ties as emergent through war’ to capture the kinds of ties that women’s participation as fighters generates within and through the armed group, highlighting how these ties may be expressed in familial terms (Matarazzo and Baines, 2021). Our exploration highlights both the ties generated through specific institutional arrangements – such as revolutionary marriage – and, more broadly, the ties that emerge through participation in the armed group and are expressed in familial terms (Zharkevich 2019). Our second frame, ‘familial ties as transformed through war’ captures how both pre-existing and emergent familial ties are in various ways (re)configured vis-à-vis wider transformations in societal gender norms that militarized violence affects. We explore how this wider restructuring of gender norms is felt and experienced through the embodied interactions that generate and maintain affective ties. For example, how might ties between daughters and parents be enacted differently, in contexts where women joining the fighting becomes a possibility or even a requirement by the armed group? Or how might revolutionary marriage generate further transformations in the gendered distribution of social reproductive labour within a family?

Implications for theorising women’s participation in armed groups

Our dynamic framework allows us to open two crucial research avenues in Conflict Studies and feminist IR scholarship. First, we systematically demonstrate how familial ties shape key processes pursued by armed groups, including the recruitment and retention of fighters. We show that familial ties are not merely – or even primarily – a barrier to women’s participation, but also operate as an enabling factor. Delving deeper, we argue that there is a distinct affective quality to how familial ties condition women’s participation in armed groups, in ways that both enable and constrain. Our research shows that the affective quality of familial ties creates contradictory demands for women in fighting forces, shaping their decisions regarding whether to join, sustain their participation, or leave armed groups. To capture this dynamic, we constructed a new typology of militarized familial ties that systematically illustrates how pre-existing and emergent familial ties condition – and are conditioned by – women’s participation in armed groups. 

Second, we offer new insights into how the political subjectivities of women fighters intersect with familial ties. While previous studies have explored the cultural politics of motherhood, surprisingly few have examined how other familial ties are invoked to rationalize, enable, or thwart women’s participation in fighting forces. Our research shows that political subjectivities are crafted within – rather than outside – the web of familial ties in which women fighters are embedded. The crafting of sisterly ties and other familial bonds is closely intertwined with the formation of political subjectivities linked to armed struggle, rather than standing in opposition to them. We argue that feminist analyses of the political subjectivities that emerge through participation in armed groups cannot shy away from engaging critically with familial ties as affective bonds.