MA Thesis in Latin American Studies
Student: Eline Hietbrink Student number: 11922648 E-mail: elinehietbrink@gmail.com
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Kees Koonings
Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA)
University of Amsterdam
iii ABSTRACT
“WE ARE FIGHTERS, REVOLUTIONARIES, POLITICAL SUBJECTS”: A STUDY ON GENDER AND DDR, BASED ON THE PERSPECTIVES AND
EXPERIENCES OF FEMALE EX-COMBATANTS OF THE FARC-EP By
Eline Hietbrink 30 November 2018
Abstract: In this study, I explore how female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP in Colombia experience and perceive changing gender roles and gender identity during their participation in the FARC-EP and the subsequent process of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR). In this, my aim is to look beyond the female victim paradigm that prevails in the academic literature on armed conflict. Moreover, this study serves to obtain a better understanding of the gender dynamics of DDR processes and of how these processes can help to fulfill the potential to challenge gender roles that is ascribed to post-conflict societies. Through semi-structured in-depth interviewing, focus group interviewing and participant observation, I put the voices female ex-combatants at the center of my research. I show how these women have used their changing gender identity to challenge gender roles within the FARC-EP and how they are currently remobilizing to challenge gender roles in broader Colombian society. I argue that in order to understand the gender dynamics in armed groups and in DDR processes, more focus should be put to women’s agency during and after conflict. Key words: DDR, FARC-EP, female ex-combatants, gender roles, gender identity
Resumen: En este estudio examino cómo las mujeres excombatientes de las FARC-EP en Colombia experimentan y perciben cambiantes roles de género y la cambiante identidad de género durante su participación en las FARC-EP y el posterior proceso de desarme, desmovilización y reintegración (DDR). Mi objetivo es mirar más allá del paradigma de la víctima femenina que prevalece en la literatura académica sobre conflictos armados. Además, este estudio sirve para obtener una mejor comprensión de la dinámica de género de los procesos de DDR y de cómo estos procesos pueden ayudar a aprovechar el potencial para desafiar los roles de género que se atribuyen a las sociedades post-conflicto. Los métodos de entrevistas semiestructuradas en profundidad, grupos focales y la observación participativa colocan a las voces de las mujeres excombatientes en el centro de mi investigación. Muestro cómo las
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mujeres han usado su cambiante identidad de género para desafiar los roles de género dentro las FARC-EP y cómo se están movilizando actualmente para desafiar los roles de género en la sociedad colombiana en general. Argumento que para entender la dinámica de género en los grupos armados y en los procesos de DDR, se debe concentrar más en la agencia de mujeres durante y después del conflicto.
Palabras clave: DDR, FARC-EP, identidad de género, mujeres excombatientes, roles de género
v Acknowledgements
This thesis would not have been possible without the support and guidance of others. I would first like to thank my thesis supervisor Prof. Dr. Kees Koonings for all the advice and feedback and for the fact that he always took the time to answer my questions. I would also like to thank CEDLA for the opportunity to develop my own research project. When I left for my fieldwork in Colombia, it was still unsure whether I would be able to come into contact with the female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP. Once in Colombia, it soon became clear that many people were willing to help me with my project, without whom I would not have been able to meet all the ex-combatants included in this research. I would like to thank Ildefonso, Myriam and everybody involved in the network of Rodeemos el Diálogo for the warm welcome in Bogotá and for the support in starting the conduction of my research project. I am furthermore thankful to Harvey and Alberto, who helped me to arrange several interviews and to visit the ex-combatants in la Pista. Of course I would also like to thank the ex-ex-combatants of the FARC-EP themselves, who were highly welcoming to me as a visitor and who let me join them in their daily activities. I am especially thankful to the female ex-combatants who were willing to take the time for an interview and who were always very open during these interviews. Finally, I would like to thank all the researchers, activists, government officials, journalists, employees of the United Nations and NGO workers who have contributed to this research by providing information and guidance.
vii Table of contents Page Abstract...iii Acknowledgements...v Table of contents...vii List of abbreviations...ix 1. Introduction...1
2. Female ex-combatants, DDR and gender; providing a theoretical framework...5
2.1. Female combatants...5
2.2. After conflict: women in processes of DDR...7
2.2.1. What is DDR?...7
2.2.2. Participation of women in DDR...9
2.3. Gender, power and inequality in Latin America...11
2.4. DDR as an opportunity to challenge gender systems...14
3. Methodology ... ...17
3.1. Research design...17
3.1.1. Ontological and epistemological approach...17
3.1.2. Qualitative case study...18
3.1.3. Research population...19
3.2. Three months of fieldwork in Colombia...19
3.2.1. Research activities... ...20
3.2.2. Reflections on positionality...22
3.2.3. Ethical considerations...23
3.2.4. Limits to this research...25
4. The DDR process of female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP...26
4.1. A short history of the FARC-EP and women...26
4.2. The DDR process... ...28
4.3. Reincorporation sites...31
4.3.1. ETCR Héctor Ramírez...31
4.3.2. La Pista... ...33
4.3.3. Bogotá...34
4.4. Female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP...35
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4.4.2. Emily: the anonymous ex-combatant in the city...36
4.4.3. Adriana; rural youngster who joined the FARC-EP for survival...37
4.4.4. Nazli: rural woman searching for gender equality...37
5. Changing gender roles...39
5.1. Changing gender roles in Colombian society...39
5.1.1. The machismo/marianismo binary...39
5.1.2. Reproduction of gender roles...41
5.2. Changing gender roles in the FARC-EP...43
5.2.1. The FARC-EP; a beacon of gender equality?...43
5.2.2. The FARC-EP hierarchy and gender...45
5.3. Gender roles and the DDR process...47
5.3.1. Gendered approach of DDR practitioners...47
5.3.2. The ex-combatants’ own role in gendered DDR...49
6. Changing gender identity...53
6.1. Being a woman...53
6.1.1. Female ex-combatants; a-typical women?...53
6.1.2. Escaping the paradigms of motherhood and victimhood...55
6.1.3. The female ex-combatants’ valuation of womanhood...57
6.2. Challenging gender roles through changing gender identity...59
6.2.1. The FARC-EP and the emancipation of women...60
6.2.2. The struggle for gender equality in the post-conflict environment...62
6.2.3. Gendered aspects of the DDR process of the FARC-EP...63
7. Discussion and conclusion...67
Bibliography...72
Appendix A: List of topics and corresponding questions that formed the basis of the semi-structured in-depth interviews with the female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP ...79
ix List of Abbreviations
ARN Agencía de Reincorporación y Normalización CNR Consejo Nacional de Reincorporación
CONPES Consejo Nacional de Política Económica y Social DDR Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration ECOMUN Economías Sociales del Común
ETA Euskadi Ta Askatasuna
ETCR Espacios Territoriales de Capacitación y Reincorporación FARC Fuerza Alternativa Revolucionaria del Común
FARC-EP Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo M-19 Movimiento 19 de Abril
NGO Non-Governmental Organization
UP Unión Patriótica
UN United Nations
UNVMC United Nations Verification Mission in Colombia ZVTN Zonas Veredales Transitorias de Normalización
1. Introduction
It was May 24, 2018, and I was walking through Bogotá, on my way to interview Sandra Ramírez, ex-combatant of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP). I walked with the two Colombian men who had helped me to arrange this interview. They talked enthusiastically about how special it was that I was able to interview this woman, as she was the widow of Manuel Marulanda, one of the founders and main leaders of the FARC-EP. It struck me that the two men did not once mention Sandra Ramírez’ history as a commander of the FARC-EP and her current status of a soon-to-be senator to underscore the exceptionality of this interview. Apparently, in the view of the men, Sandra derived her power from her belated husband, not from her own accomplishments. This marked a difference between the two men and the ex-combatants I met during my fieldwork in Colombia, who never mentioned the name of Marulanda when they spoke about Sandra. Once her personal assistant had allowed me to take an hour of Sandra’s tight-scheduled time, I asked the ex-commander why she had once made the decision to join the FARC-EP. She answered:
“I had several motives to join the FARC. One of the reasons was that I wanted to become a doctor, but there was no money. I wanted to become a doctor because my father worked with medicines, he took care of our neighbors. This kind of work is being done in the countryside, he was not a real doctor but people take care of each other. I wanted to become a doctor, but there was no money for this. The lack of money was thus a motive. Another motive was my mother, my mother strongly influenced my choice. Not because she wanted me to become a guerrillera, never. Even when I went, she did not agree. But she influenced my choice because we [Sandra and her siblings] saw her cry when we were little, because of stress. She cried and cried. And I know for sure that she did not want her children to live her life, to follow her destiny. Having so many children, every one or two years another child. And she never left the house. She was in the house permanently, looking after all the children, washing clothes. That was her life. And it must have given her a lot of stress, and she must have had discussions with my father sometimes. And that is why there were many tears, asking us to please go study so that we could prepare ourselves for another destiny, another life. And this affected me, in wanting to be independent and wanting to study. And it affected me so much, that when the guerrilla came to my home for the first time, my attention was enormously attracted by a female comrade who gave orders, who had leadership. And I felt the duty to explore, to ask why a women could lead, and why that was accepted. For me, that came as a surprise. I had never seen that in my life. But they [the combatants] were following the orders without any hassle.
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And after that they got along well, in an atmosphere of camaraderie, sometimes even an atmosphere of friendship. That is why I wanted to explore what the women were doing in the guerrilla, what they could do. And when I enlarged my view, I said: ‘I am going. I am going with them, they will take me. I do not want to stay here”.
This anecdote exposes several interesting themes related to gender. It hints at unequal power relations between men and women in Colombian society, at differences in how women in public functions are perceived within Colombian society and the FARC-EP, at a difference in roles that women fulfilled in (rural) Colombian society and within the FARC-EP, and on a connectedness between women’s acquaintance with the FARC-EP and their changing perspectives on womanhood and on the gendered self. In this thesis, I address these themes by exploring female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP’s perspectives on gender. I do not only focus on how these perspectives changed during the women’s participation in the FARC-EP, but also on how these perspectives are shaped through the subsequent process of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR).
From the academic literature on processes of DDR, in which members of armed groups shift from military structures to civilian livelihoods (Mazurana & Cole, 2013), it appears that female ex-combatants often face obstacles in these processes because of stereotypes of the ‘peaceful woman’ and the ‘female victim’. These obstacles undermine the potential to challenge gender stereotypes that several authors ascribe to DDR processes (Bouta, 2005; Dietrich Ortega, 2009; Theidon, 2009). According to Felices-Luna (2007), armed groups that include female combatants are able to distance themselves from existing gender constructions in the societies in which they operate and to treat female and male combatants as equals. Bouta (2005) moreover emphasizes that women often acquire empowerment and new skills during their membership of armed groups. Therefore, female ex-combatants’ views on what it means to be a woman, what women are capable of and what role women should play in society might deviate from the prevailing views on these issues in society. MacKenzie (2009) states that many attempts by scholars to explore the experiences of female ex-combatants strikingly overlook these women’s own voices. Research into how female ex-combatants construct concepts of gender during their reintegration into society might deepen our understanding of gender dynamics in both armed groups and post-conflict societies. The case of the FARC-EP, that started its DDR process in 2016, offers me the chance to research the DDR process of female ex-combatants as it happens.
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The FARC-EP started as a predominantly male organization in 1964. However, from 1985 on, it officially acknowledged women as equal combatants to their male counterparts (Ferro Medina & Uribe Ramón, 2002; Herrera & Porch, 2008). During its heyday, women made up around 40% of the 18.000 combatants of the FARC-EP (Stanski, 2006). Opinions on to what extent the FARC-EP was a gender equal organization differ, but the general opinion is that the level of gender equality was higher than in the rural areas where most of the FARC-EP combatants came from. Moreover, by participating in armed conflict and operating as political subjects, female combatants of the FARC-EP transcended traditional gender roles. Therefore, the participation in the FARC-EP could be considered a process of emancipation for Colombian women. Besides exploring this process, I seek to research how the DDR process of the FARC-EP fits within and addresses this emancipation process. In this thesis, I therefore aim to answer the following research question:
How do female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP experience and perceive changing gender roles and gender identity during their participation in the FARC-EP and the subsequent process of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration?
By bringing the female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP into focus, I aim to challenge the image of the woman as the eternal victim and to weaken the gender binary in the academic literature. In chapter two, I further elaborate on this gender binary, and on the theoretical debates around female (ex)-combatants, DDR and gender. With this qualitative case study of the DDR process of female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP, I aim to contribute to these debates. I for example explore how the female ex-combatants reflect upon what it means to be a woman, both for Colombian society and DDR practitioners as for themselves. Moreover, I research whether female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP experience pressure to fit into a certain image of what it means to be a woman and how they value their own gender in relation to other gender groups. Furthermore, I seek to understand experienced relations between gender and power in the FARC-EP, Colombian society and the DDR process. I use the methods of in-depth semi-structured interviewing and focus group interviewing to bring the voices of twenty female ex-combatants into the debate. Moreover, I use the methods of participant observation and document analysis to further understand the context in which these voices are embedded. In chapter three, I extensively elaborate on this methodological approach.
Chapter four then serves to provide a background to this study, with a short overview of the history of the FARC-EP and the current DDR process. Moreover, I provide four profiles of female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP. These profiles enable me to emphasize the diversity of
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the women included in this research and to contextualize their perspectives and experiences, without harming their privacy and security. The perspectives and experiences of the female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP are central to chapter five and six, which form the core of this research. In these chapters, I respectively discuss how the women of the FARC-EP experience and perceive changing gender roles and gender identity. I explore how the female ex-combatants give meaning to their experiences in the armed group and in their current DDR process, and how the subjective meanings of these experiences shape their perspectives on gender. In chapter seven, I discuss my findings in the light of the academic literature that forms the basis of this research.
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2. Female ex-combatants, DDR and gender; providing a theoretical framework
Worldwide, women do participate in armed conflict. Nevertheless, as I stated in the introduction, traditional conceptualizations of what it means to be a woman obstruct the figure of the female (ex)-combatant. In order to obtain a better understanding of this issue and of how DDR processes can possibly challenge traditional conceptualizations of femininity, I discuss the academic literature on female ex-combatants, DDR and gender. I start with an elaboration of the literature on female combatants, describing what has been written about the topic and identifying gaps in the literature. Subsequently, I elaborate on the concept of DDR. I explore why female ex-combatants often do not participate in DDR processes and which obstacles they face when they do. The third section of this chapter is devoted to the concept of gender and to how this concept serves to better understand the specific reality of female ex-combatants in DDR processes. In the last section, I explain how DDR can help to challenge existing gender systems in post-conflict societies.
2.1. Female combatants
In the literature on political violence, there is a tendency to equal the ‘combatant’ with the male and the ‘victim’ with the female. Alison (2004) argues that the lack of literature on the roles and experiences of women during armed conflict is the result of the traditional conceptualization of security in masculinized terms. She states that the very notion of ‘female combatant’ points at the apparent unconventionality of the combatant being female. Similarly, Hamilton (2007) emphasizes that violence has generally been defined as an act conducted by men, with women being the object. Although the focus on men as perpetrators of violence is understandable, given the “widespread and cross-cultural reality of violence against women” (Hamilton, 2007, p. 133), the masculine conceptualization of violence leaves the female perpetrators largely unresearched. Nevertheless, more recent literature on political violence has started to explore the phenomenon of the female combatant.
Studies on armed groups show that around the world, women participate in these organizations (Henshaw, 2016; Thomas & Bond, 2015; Wood & Thomas, 2016). Henshaw (2016) demonstrates that women in armed groups are to be found in both non-combat and combat roles, including leadership roles. From the academic literature, it appears that female combatants are often assumed to be forced by men to participate in armed conflict (Felices-Luna, 2007; Hamilton, 2007; Henshaw, 2016). However, Henshaw (2016) shows that the majority of movements that include women do not appear to use forced participation techniques systematically. On top of the assumption of the use of physical force, female combatants are
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regularly assumed to be emotionally or psychologically forced to participate in armed conflict (Felices-Luna, 2007; Hamilton, 2007). According to Hamilton (2007, p. 137), female members of the radical Basque nationalist organization Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) were often portrayed as girls who were “lured into criminal activity” by their boyfriends, “against their will or even knowledge”. Henshaw (2016) argues that the label of “combat wife” (p. 50) that is often applied to female combatants wrongly excludes women from agency. Felices-Luna (2007) notes that all her interviewees – Peruvian and Irish women who participated in armed groups – took the decision to participate in political violence “in a stoical manner and with pride” (Felices-Luna, 2007, p. 15). She argues that these women opted to join the armed conflict in order to address political, economic and social inequalities in their countries and to protect and defend the community they belonged to. Kampwirth (2002), Hamilton (2007) and Thomas and Bond (2015) all notice that women have the same motives as men to participate in armed groups.
Still, the participation of women in armed groups frequently causes raised eyebrows, both in the armed groups themselves as in the societies they operate in. Considering the armed groups themselves, Felices-Luna (2007) makes a distinction between the organizational and the individual level. She argues that at the organizational level, armed groups that include female combatants seem to be able to distance themselves from existing gender constructions in the societies in which they operate and to treat female and male combatants as equals. The women Felices-Luna (2007) interviewed indicated that they did not feel discriminated against during their training or in the distribution of tasks. At the individual level, however, some male combatants had difficulties with surrendering the male prerogatives they were used to (Felices-Luna, 2007). Hamilton (2007) states that several women within the ETA felt discriminated by some of their male counterparts and felt pressured to prove themselves as armed activists. Regarding the societies that armed groups operate in, Felices-Luna (2007) argues that female combatants are often presented as being asexual, having masculine characteristics or as ‘failed women’. From this, one could derive that it is apparently difficult for many to believe that a ‘real’ woman would conduct violence. Alison (2004) emphasizes this by concluding that the “figure of the female combatant is often only uneasily accepted” (p. 462). In this thesis, I aim to make the female combatant more visible focusing on her own perceptions, rather than on the perceptions of others.
7 2.2. After conflict: women in processes of DDR
The focus of this research is not on active female combatants, but on the combatants who are to participate in processes of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) once their armed group has signed for peace, as the FARC-EP did in 2016. The United Nations (UN) define DDR as “a process [of] removing weapons from the hands of combatants, taking the combatants out of military structures and helping them to integrate socially and economically into society by finding civilian livelihoods” (in Mazurana & Cole, 2013, p. 197). Of course, conflict and post-conflict are not a dichotomy, and the post-conflict society is not free from insecurity and violence (Duchen and Bandhauer-Schöffmann, 2000). However, DDR has the potential to contribute to the reduction of insecurity and conflict and the building of a durable, stable peace (Dzinesa, 2017). In order to do so, DDR processes should include all ex-combatants of the armed group in question. In this section, I therefore elaborate on how to increase and to enhance the participation of women.
2.2.1. What is DDR?
During the first stage of DDR, arms and weapons are collected and removed in order to restore the national state’s monopoly over the use of violence and to create a secure framework for the other two stages (Dzinesa, 2017; Sriram & Herman, 2009). It is important to ensure the safe storage or destruction of weapons, in order to prevent the ‘recycling’ of collected arms back into society (Klem, Douma, Frerks, Gompelman & Van Laar, 2008; Muggah, 2006). The second stage, demobilization, encompasses the discharge of combatants from armed groups and their transportation to designated camps (Dzinesa, 2017; Klem et al., 2008). In these camps, ex-combatants often receive support packages to assist them in their transition to civilian life, for example consisting of shelter, food, medical services and short-term education (Sriram & Herman, 2009). The latter stage of DDR, reintegration, refers to the ex-combatants’ acquirement of a civilian livelihood. Reintegration has economic, social, political and psychological components. Namely, the process consists of gaining sustainable employment, engaging with the communities to which ex-combatants (re)turn, participating in decision-making processes and dealing with war-related mental traumas (Dzinesa, 2017; Klem et al., 2008; Sriram & Herman, 2009). According to Dzinesa (2017), reintegration is the most integral component of DDR processes, as it can contribute to durable peace. Namely, by ensuring ex-combatants’ well-being, reintegration efforts can reduce the chance that they return to violence.
The academic literature shows that DDR processes have changed over time. The so-called first generation of DDR, roughly encompassing all the DDR processes that took place
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before the 1990s, had a strong focus on the reduction of arms in post-conflict societies (Muggah & Krause, 2009). These processes moreover offered straightforward demobilization packages to former combatants, frequently including “reintegration into newly created national armed forces” (Muggah & Krause, 2009, 138). First generation DDR processes were intended for formed military units, which made it relatively clear who was eligible to participate. Furthermore, these early DDR processes were carved by the agency of the – strong – state (Dzinesa, 2017). By contrast, the second generation DDR processes that emerged in the 1990s took place in fragile state contexts, and were supported by the UN (Dzinesa, 2017). Whereas first generation DDR focused mostly on the political process of (re)establishing the security of national state institutions, second generation DDR processes increasingly focused on so-called human security goals and broader socio-economic development. Moreover, second generation DDR favored a bottom-up approach with a focus on community security over the top-down approach focusing on the formation of state institutions that are to coordinate DDR activities from above (Muggah & Krause, 2009). Finally, Dzinesa (2017) states that in second generation DDR, complex landscapes of force with several rebel groups simultaneously disarming and rearming made it difficult to define who was eligible for DDR processes.
Over the last two decades, DDR adapted yet again. According to Muggah & O’Donnell (2015), a third generation of DDR had arrived by 2010. According to Muggah and O’Donnell (2015), DDR programs are nowadays more diverse than ever. They argue that the real parameters of a DDR process are defined by a complex period of negotiation rather than by prescriptions that are set from above. This period partly encompasses formal bargaining at the (inter)national level, among reintegration agencies, state representatives and donor countries (Muggah & O’Donnell, 2015). On the other hand, a great part of negotiation and decision-making regarding DDR would occur informally, at the local level. Community elites, ex-combatants, former commanders, project implementers and others negotiate “the terms of peace on the front line” (Muggah & O’Donnell, 2015, p. 6). These actors might for example disagree about whether and to what extent combatants should receive financial support, what role ex-combatants should fulfill in their new communities or how these communities should contribute to the reintegration process. Third generation DDR represents a transition from narrowly understood, isolated interventions toward processes that are intentionally connected to national development plans (Muggah & O’Donnell, 2015). Furthermore, as it encourages ex-combatants to embrace a positive, forward-looking identity, third generation DDR includes a sociological dimension. The DDR process of the FARC-EP fits within the framework of third generation DDR, as it flows out of “one of the longest, most comprehensive, and detailed peace treaties of
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all time” (Lezama & May, 2018, p. 38) and is shaped by complex formal and informal negotiation processes. In chapter four, I further elaborate on this particular process.
2.2.2. Participation of women in DDR
Women regularly do not participate in DDR processes. One explanation for this trend is the finding that DDR practitioners tend to overlook women. Partly, narrow definitions of what it means to be a combatant would prevent women from being eligible for DDR (Mazurana & Cole, 2013). Several authors argue that women in armed groups often fulfill so-called ‘supporting roles’ and would therefore not match selection criteria such as the possession of a weapon or the ability to use a weapon (Ager, Stark, Olsen, Wessells & Boothby, 2010; Bouta, 2005; Kaufman & Williams, 2015). However, Farr (2003) asserts that female ex-combatants are also overlooked when they did fulfill the more ‘traditional’ role of the combatant, because of stereotypes that portray women as being inherently more peaceful and caring than men. According to Farr (2003), policy makers behind DDR programs would find it difficult to address the women that do not fit gender stereotypes. Rather, they focus only on the women that are indeed considered peaceful, for example by including female civilians in community peace-building projects (Farr, 2003). Finally, Bouta (2005) and MacKenzie (2009) argue that the difference in attention to female and male ex-combatants can be explained by the extent to which both groups are securitized. Both authors state that the male combatant is considered a traditional security issue, while the female combatant is classified as a social or domestic matter. This would explain why DDR processes address the reintegration of male ex-combatants as a vital issue in the transition from war to peace, while the reintegration of female ex-combatants is downplayed as a simple “return to normal” or a social concern (MacKenzie, 2009, p. 259).
However, MacKenzie (2009, p. 241) warns that a mere focus on the “exclusion of women” by DDR processes perpetuates the existing stereotype of “the female war victim”. She argues that the discourse of women who are left behind by projects that probably would have benefited them denies these women any agency (MacKenzie, 2009). Similarly, Gilmartin (2017, p. 459) states that the debate on women and DDR focuses too much on female combatants’ exclusion from DDR processes, which reinforces “linkages between women and victimhood”. In fact, MacKenzie (2009) finds that many female ex-combatants in Sierra Leone made conscious choices not to participate in formal DDR. Mazurana and Cole (2013) also underscore that women often actively decide not to participate in DDR programs nor to identify themselves as ex-combatants. One of the reasons for female ex-combatants not to participate in DDR would be the expectation that DDR programs only focus on “men with guns”
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(MacKenzie, 2009, p. 251). As previous section showed, this expectation is in many cases likely to become reality.
Another reason for women to avoid DDR is the fear of stigmatization (Bouta, 2005; Burman & McKay, 2007; Worthen, Veale, McKay & Wessels, 2010). In fact, female ex-combatants often face double stigma (Dietrich Ortega, 2009). First, all ex-ex-combatants have to deal with perceptions that they are murderers or criminals within the communities they (re)turn to (Dietrich Ortega, 2009). On top of this general stigmatization, female ex-combatants “find their very womanhood questioned” because they have “transgressed social norms of female behavior” (Dietrich Ortega, 2009, pp. 166-167). Similarly, Mazurana and Cole (2013, p. 197) state that the transition period from combatants to civilians is “an especially challenging time for women and girls known to have been in armed groups because their violations of traditional forms of female respectability, so often tied up with patriarchal constructions of chastity and virtue, will put them at odds with how traditional forms of femininity are often re-entrenched in the post-conflict”. Burman and McKay (2007) argue that in the case of Sierra Leone, female ex-combatants who returned to their communities as mothers were stigmatized in particular, because they did not adhere to traditional conceptions of marriage and motherhood. Moreover, women sometimes decide to avoid DDR projects because they no longer want to be associated with the armed group they participated in (Dietrich Ortega, 2009; MacKenzie, 2009) or because of “transportation and childcare issues” (Mazurana & Cole, 2013, p. 206).
The women that do participate in DDR processes regularly face several obstacles (Bouta, 2005; Dietrich Ortega, 2009; Mazurana & Cole, 2013). Dietrich Ortega (2009) presents four sets of obstacles that female ex-combatants who participate in DDR programs face. The first set regards an inadequate consideration of the specific needs and capacities of female ex-combatants in the planning and implementation of DDR programs (Dietrich Ortega, 2009). This results in a lack of “sexual and reproductive health care, maternal health care, hygienic needs related to menstruation, and specialized psychosocial assistance in confidential, secure, and violence-free environments” Dietrich Ortega (2009, pp. 164-165). The second set of obstacles consists of factors that deter women from fully advantaging the benefits and services that DDR programs have to offer. For example, Dietrich Ortega (2009, p. 165) states that DDR processes “often promote a traditional sexual division of labor by offering training for female combatants in ‘female’ skills, such as cooking, tailoring, and mat weaving, that support the ‘return’ of women into the domestic and private sphere”.
The third set of obstacles is “related to the breakup of chains of command and the disintegration of collective group identity in favor of individual identity” (Dietrich Ortega,
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2009, p. 165). According to Dietrich Ortega (2009), the preservation of certain chains of command might create a support network that would have a positive impact on the reintegration of female ex-combatants. For example, collective demobilization might contribute to a continued social and political activism by women and might protect female ex-combatants from the negative effects of stigmatization and subsequent marginalization (Dietrich Ortega, 2009). Wiegink (2015, p.11) shows that post-conflict networks that emerge from former armed groups can provide ex-combatants “with a sense of belonging, friendships, social security, economic possibilities, and expectations for a more tolerable life, which are (…) all qualities of a meaningful civilian life”. The last set of obstacles that Dietrich Ortega (2009) distinguishes is related to this stigmatization. She asserts that DDR programs fail to address the consequences of gendered stigmatization. Dietrich Ortega (2009) even states that DDR processes are likely to contribute to the stigmatization and marginalization of female ex-combatants, through the gendered practices of DDR that she described in the other three sets of obstacles (Dietrich Ortega, 2009). Farr (2003) agrees with Dietrich Ortega (2009), stating that DDR processes tend to reinforce, rather than mitigate, the difficulties that women associated with armed groups face. On top of other reasons to avoid DDR, the whole of obstacles presented here might deter women from participating in DDR processes.
2.3. Gender, power and inequality in Latin America
The image of the female victim, the stigmatization of female ex-combatants and the failure of DDR practitioners to address the particular interests and needs of female ex-combatants are all related with ideas of what it means to be a woman. This makes gender a central concept to my research, defined as “the social representation of perceived biological differences” (French & Bliss, 2007, p. 1). In this section, I explore the concept of gender and related concepts such as power, roles and identity. I furthermore discuss the literature on gender in Latin America.
Through social interaction, people ‘do gender’, meaning that they create “differences between girls and boys and women and men, differences that are not natural, essential, or biological” (West and Zimmerman, 1987, p. 137). As gender is the result of social interaction, it is defined differently in different times and places (French & Bliss, 2007). By taking a gender perspective, I therefore aim to understand the changing meanings that persons attach to gender. Through constructing female and male identities, people create feminine and masculine subjects (French & Bliss, 2007). As femininity and masculinity are constructed mutually, they form a binary (French & Bliss, 2007). According to French and Bliss (2007) this binary construction has two negative consequences. It both “limits the possibility of other alternative constructions
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of gender” and “makes the definitions of femininity and masculinity seem natural and not subject to change” (French & Bliss, 2007, p. 2). Moreover, French and Bliss (2007) argue that the femininity/masculinity binary makes other binaries seem natural or legitimate as well, such as private/public, home/work, passive/active, and, I argue based upon the literature described above, victim/combatant.
In order to understand how female ex-combatants experience and perceive the constructed femininity/masculinity binary, and how they relate their own identity to this binary, I focus on how female ex-combatants experience and perceive gender roles and gender identity. The Dictionary of Media and Communication of the Oxford University (2016) defines gender roles as “loosely connected sets of traditional cultural norms and social expectations for psychological traits, attitudes, perceptions, behavior, affective relations, and appearance regarded as appropriate in particular contexts for each sex, widely regarded within that culture as universal but in fact culturally variable (or differently valued)”. Debiaggi Dantas (2002) adds to this definition that gender roles are not only culturally variable but also variable in time, as gender roles may change as a society’s needs change. This is important for my research, as I focus on changing gender roles. The notion that gender roles are variable over time challenges the idea that the cultural norms and social expectations embedded in gender roles are inherently ‘traditional’. In my view, one can speak of ‘traditional gender roles’ as well as of ‘modern gender roles’ or of ‘changing gender roles’. Therefore, I adjust the earlier definition by stating that gender roles are loosely connected sets of cultural norms and social expectations for psychological traits, attitudes, perceptions, behavior, affective relations, and appearance regarded as appropriate in particular contexts for each sex, that are culturally variable, differently valued and subject to change over time.
Whereas gender roles thus refer to societal norms and expectations of gender, the concept of gender identity regards the personal and private experience of gender (see the definition of gender roles in A Dictionary of Media and Communication, 2016). According to Healey (2014, p. 3), gender identity “reflects a deeply felt and experienced sense of one’s own gender”. In this, gender identity is related to gender position and deals with the question of whether an individual feels like a man, woman, transgender, intersex, gender queer or something else (see Haslanger, 2000). Rather than taking such a one-dimensional approach towards gender identity, Egan and Perry (2001, p. 451) define gender identity as “a multidimensional construct encompassing an individual’s (a) knowledge of membership in a gender category, (b) felt compatibility with his or her gender group (i.e., self-perceptions of gender typicality as well as feelings of contentment with one’s gender, (c) felt pressure for
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gender conformity, and (d) attitudes toward gender groups”. I use this multi-dimensional definition for my research.
The concept of gender, and therefore the concepts of gender roles and gender identity, are directly related to power (Paechter, 2006). Jónasdóttir, Bryson and Jones (2011, p. 109) define power as “a capacity of an individual to initiate or control the outcome of a situation, by enabling or precluding certain actions”. However, they underscore that power should be understood “not only as an individual attribute or capacity, but also as a relatively stable, yet malleable, set of relations comprised of individual and collective actions and discursive practices, framed by specific institutional settings and whose meanings are mediated by cultural symbols” (Jónasdóttir, Bryson & Jones, 2011, p. 111). I argue that the collective gendering of the private/home/passive/victim as feminine and public/work/active/combatant as masculine creates a social order in which men are the dominant social group (see Lindsey, 2016). Therefore, the gender binary can be seen as an ideology that maintains structural inequality between men and women.
Feminist theory addresses this structural inequality, as it encompasses the theory through which a “status quo that is disadvantageous for women” (Lindsey, 2016, p. 14) can be challenged. In order to contribute to this theory, I explore what resources female ex-combatants amass from their experience as combatants and from their DDR process, and how they use this – or not – to challenge existing gender systems. The feminist perspective moreover pays attention to the multiple oppressions people may face based on their social class, race, and gender (Lindsey, 2016) through the concept of intersectionality. Lindsey (2016, pp. 14-15) defines intersectionality as describing “the process that combines risks from multiple statuses associated with disadvantages that result in a matrix of domination of oppression”. Although power systems based on gender are the main focus of this thesis, I address other power systems where relevant.
Structural inequality between women and men can certainly observed in Latin America. Kerry (1993, p. 16) indicates that the women’s place in Latin America is “still the private sphere of home and family”. Kerry (1993, p. 16) states that since 1980s, Latin America has undergone major economic and political upheaval, and that women have become “a major force in the struggle for social change”. According to Icken Safa (1990), the participation in social movements generated changes in the self-definition of Latin American women. Schwindt-Bayer (2006, p. 572) notes that “women’s entry into arenas previously dominated by men, and women’s experiences in the women’s movement that developed during the transitions to democracy in the 1980s, have increased women’s awareness of and interest in feminist issues,
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whether or not they accept the label of those issues as ‘feminist’”. The changes in self-definition of Latin American women that Icken Safa (1990, p. 363) signaled would “imply a redefinition of women’s roles from a purely domestic image as guardians of the private sphere into equal participants as citizens in a democratic state”.
However, in more recent books and articles, several authors suggest that traditional gender roles are still prevailing in Latin America (Gibbons & Luna, 2015; Ñopo, 2011; Tiano, 2011; among others). Gibbons and Luna (2015, p. 307) argue that disparities between women’s and men’s conditions in Latin America “are bolstered by the ideologies of machismo, an exaggerated masculinity associated with hypersexuality and violence, and marianismo, the notion that women should be pure, spiritual, subordinate, and self-effacing”. Colombian society is one of the societies that has been described as patriarchal and machista (Chinkin, 2017; Farah Quijano, 2009). Especially in rural areas, Colombian women are expected to stay at home, take care of the children and perform household tasks (Rodriguez Castro, Pini & Baker, 2016; Zuluago Cordillo, 2015; Zuluago Sánchez, 2011). In the following section, I will explore the literature on how DDR processes can challenge such gender systems.
2.4. DDR as an opportunity to challenge gender systems
Hiller and Baudin (2016) state that in order to get an understanding of gender inequalities and their dynamics, it is crucial to explore how gender roles change over time. According to Lindsey (2016), societies normally allow for a small degree of flexibility in acting out gender roles. However, she claims that in times of rapid social change, the limits of gender roles are frequently in a state of flux and uncertainty about what behavior is appropriate rises. The post-war period is such a time of change. Writing on the periods after the first world post-war and the second world war in Europe, respectively, Sharp and Stibbe (2011) and Duchen and Bandhauer-Schöffmann (2000) state that these transitional years have hardly been researched in their own right. Even more absent is “the gendered dimension of experience during these years” (Duchen & Bandhauer-Schöffmann, 2000, p.1). Sharp and Stibbe (2011, p.4) consider the years that followed the first world war to be a crucial period, as they “constitute a distinctive period full of radical potential during which the renegotiation of gender relations took place”. However, this renegotiation did not always result in a change in gender roles. In Great Britain, women returned to domestic roles because the discourse was that Britain had to go ‘back to normal’ and because men sought to return to the jobs that women took over during the first world war (Rea, 2011). In Albania, although some important steps towards gender equality were made,
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most of the hope for the improvement of the position of women dashed during the years after the war (Musaj & Nicholson, 2011).
Although post-war contexts offer the potential to challenge existing gender systems, an actual change is thus not a matter of course. The academic literature puts forward several ways that DDR processes can help to challenge gender systems by ‘adding gender’ to DDR. A first step could be to include women at the bargaining table during peace negotiations preceding DDR processes and to encourage women’s participation in the planning and implementation of DDR programs (Farr, 2003). Farr (2003, p. 30) shows that “public commitments within the UN and other international organizations to promote women into positions of power” did not result in a significant number of women at leadership positions within the organizations that deal with DDR. More recently, Gilmartin (2017) still observes an absence of women at the bargaining table. The inclusion of women in the policy process behind DDR might weaken the perception that the role of women is defined within the domestic or social sphere rather than within the political or security sphere (MacKenzie, 2009).
DDR practitioners can further enhance their gender focus by gaining an understanding of the local context. Krause and Jütersonke (2005, p. 459) warn that when DDR practitioners use practices and approaches of some kind of general ‘recipe’ without contextualizing them, domestic security will most probably not increase. In this contextualization of DDR, the gender dynamics of a given context should also be taken into consideration. Another opportunity to challenge gender stereotypes lies within the interconnection between DDR and transitional justice processes (Dietrich Ortega, 2009; Duthie, 2009). Dietrich Ortega (2009) notes transitional justice processes often leave out female ex-combatants. Although one could argue that this is beneficial for women – they do not get punished – Dietrich Ortega (2009, p. 171) asserts that the denial of women’s agency during war can prevent female ex-combatants from being recognized as “potential leaders in community reintegration and reconciliation processes”. Another step towards more gender equality through DDR could be to take a more strengths-based approach, encouraging ex-combatants to take ownership over their own reintegration process rather than just providing them ‘treatments’ or ‘aid’ (McEvoy & Shirlow, 2009). In this manner, ex-combatants themselves can decide upon the kind of civilian livelihood they want for the future, rather than that they are pushed into certain gender roles.
Besides DDR practitioners, academics can play a role in changing post-conflict gender systems. As I stated in the introduction of this thesis, it is important to put women at the center of research. According to MacKenzie (2009), listening and referring to the voices and experiences of women is crucial for women’s empowerment. Burmanand McKay (2007) argue
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that theory on female ex-combatants should be developed on the basis of multiple voices, in particular those of the most marginalized. With this thesis, I bring the voices of 20 female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP to the center of research.
17 3. Methodology
In this chapter, I explain and account for the methodological choices I made for my research. In the first part, I address the design of the research, explaining my ontological and epistemological position and elaborating on my research case and research population. In the second part, I provide an overview of my research activities, before elaborating on issues related with positionality and ethics and on the limits of this research.
3.1. Research design
In my research, I explore how female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP give meaning to their gendered experiences in the guerrilla and in the DDR process of the FARC-EP. Moreover, I research how they relate these subjective meanings to their gender identity and to prevailing gender roles.
3.1.1. Ontological and epistemological approach
I take a constructivist ontological position in this research, as I consider the ‘reality’ of gender to be produced through social interaction and to be constantly under revision (Bryman, 2012). This not only applies to the concept of gender roles, which are very clearly produced through the interaction of members of a particular social group, but also to gender identity, which according to Choi (2012) is constructed through personal negotiations as well as social factors. Choi (2012, p. 44) explains how “gender identity undergoes modification and expansion in their daily interaction with the family, schools, the media, the broader community, workplace and other social institutions”. Following the constructivist standpoint that there is no reality ‘out there’ to be found but that reality is a social construct (Tuli, 2011), this research focuses on how people make sense of the world they live in. I thus use an interpretivist epistemological approach, which “requires the social scientist to grasp the subjective meaning of social action” (Bryman, 2012, p. 712). According to Snape and Spencer (2013), the interpretivist approach focuses on “understanding lived experience from the point of view of those who hold it”. For this research, this means that I focus on the experiences of female ex-combatants from their perspective. Specifically, my interest is in the current perspectives of the female ex-combatants. I am thus not searching for any historical, chronological truth about the lived experiences of the female ex-combatants but rather for how the “current, subjective meaning” (Choi, 2012, p.44) of these experiences shapes their perspectives on gender.
18 3.1.2. Qualitative case study
According to Bryman (2012), a constructivist ontological position and an interpretivist epistemological position are key features of qualitative research. The other two key features that Bryman (2012, p. 36) distinguishes enable me to further explain why I choose to conduct qualitative research. First, I focus on “words rather than quantification in the collection and analysis of data” (Bryman, 2012, p. 36), as I believe that it is impossible to grasp the perspectives and experiences of female ex-combatants in numbers. Second, the relationship between research and theory in this research is inductive. Namely, I aim to generate theory, emerging from the collected data, rather than to test theory with these data. Moreover, I use a qualitative research strategy because I aim to “understand the complexities of the world through participant’s experiences” (Tuli, 2011, p. 102). Specifically, I use a qualitative case study design. Case study research deals with “the complexity and particular nature of the case in question” (Bryman, 2012, p. 66). The qualitative case study design enables me to deeply explore the context in which the research participants are located and to understand the complexities of the DDR process. I choose a case study design because I aim to shed light on the unique aspects of one particular DDR process rather than to generate “statements that apply regardless of time and space” (Bryman, 2012, p. 69).
The case that I intensively examine for this research is the DDR process of the FARC-EP in Colombia. From the very beginning, women have been present within the FARC-FARC-EP (Stanski, 2006). Although only two of the first 48 FARC-EP fighters were women, the proportion of women has later been estimated as 40 percent of 18.000 members (Stanski, 2006). In its active years, the FARC-EP has presented itself as “a relief from everyday discrimination and a solution for women committed to solving inequality” (Stanski, 2006, p. 139). Moreover, the group has described its Marxist-Leninist political project as a means for female members to fight for equal treatment and women’s rights (Stanski, 2006). Meanwhile, I noted in the previous chapter that the society in which the FARC operated, Colombian society, has been defined as a patriarchal, machista society (Chinkin, 2017; Farah Quijano, 2009). Especially in the rural areas of Colombia, women fulfill traditional domestic roles (Rodriguez Castro, Pini & Baker, 2016). It may thus be expected that the female FARC-EP combatants, many of whom come from rural areas (Sanin & Carranza Franco, 2017) have strongly deviated from existing gender roles. Moreover, they may have experienced gender relations within the FARC-EP that were more equal than within Colombian society in general. This makes the case of the DDR
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process of the FARC-EP an interesting case to research how female ex-combatants perceive and experience gender roles and gender identity.
Gender did play a role during the peace process that preceded the current DDR process. For example, a Gender Sub-Commission was involved in the process and female members of the FARC have played an active role in the peace talks (Boutron & Gómez, 2017). However, the gender focus of the peace accord and the DDR process again appears to be concentrated around the involvement of female victims and civilian peace builders (Boutron & Gómez, 2017; Chinkin, 2017). It is therefore important to bring the voices and experiences of female ex-combatants into focus. This case moreover offers the unique opportunity to research the dynamics of gender and DDR while the DDR process is still ongoing.
3.1.3. Research population
My research population consists of a primary and a secondary research population. The primary research population comprises the female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP. These women, and their perspectives and experiences, are central to my research. The secondary, supplementary, research population partly consists of persons with expertise in DDR processes, the FARC-EP and/or gender relations in Colombia. Moreover, the secondary research population includes institutional actors that are involved in the current DDR process in Colombia, non-institutional stakeholders of the DDR process and female ex-combatants of former armed groups, other than the FARC-EP, in Colombia. Although the supplementary research population cannot provide me direct answers on the research question regarding the perceptions and experiences of female ex-combatants, these actors can provide me information on the context in which the narratives of female ex-combatants are located. Specifically, to quote Choi (2012, p. 44), this research population may help me to understand “the contexts and constructions in which their gendered identities are embedded”. I will further elaborate on the research participants in the next section. 3.2. Three months of fieldwork in Colombia
Between May and August 2018, I was in Colombia to gather data for this research. In this section, I describe and account for my research activities during my fieldwork. Subsequently, I address my positionality as a researcher, ethical issues and the limits of this research.
3.2.1. Research activities
Before going to the field, I did not succeed in coming into contact with female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP. I decided that Bogotá would be the best place to start my research, as it hosts
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the headquarters of organizations that could provide me access to my research population, such as the United Nations Verification Mission in Colombia (UNVMC), the Agencía de Reincorporación y Normalización (ARN) of the Colombian government and the new political party that emerged from the FARC-EP. Moreover, I figured that the female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP in Bogotá that are active members of the political party would be more visible and better approachable. Once in Bogotá I soon encountered key resource persons, who introduced me to ex-combatants of the FARC-EP.
In the end, I conducted semi-structured in-depths interviews with seven female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP in Bogotá, from the two very visible women that would join the Colombian Senate in August 2018 to women that tried to hide their identity as ex-combatants. Furthermore, I interviewed a female ex-combatant from Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19), a Colombian guerrilla group that demobilized in 1990 (Söderström, 2016), and an employee from the ARN. Interviewing was my main research method, because I argue that the only way to get an understanding of the experiences of female ex-combatants is to include their voices in the research. Moreover, interviewing enables me to get an understanding of “how a certain series of events unfolded in relation to a current situation” (Bryman, 2012, p. 495). Since most of the experiences – such as the ex-combatants’ participation in an armed group – took place in the past, gathering the narratives about these experiences by the ex-combatants themselves it is the closest I can get to understanding the experiences. I choose this specific type of interviewing because of my focus on the worldview of the research participants (Bryman, 2012). By keeping the interviews semi-structured, I avoided to start the interviews with too many preconceptions and enabled flexibility in the interviews (Bryman, 2012). Often, the interviewees led me to certain topics or issues that I did not think of beforehand. The list of topics and questions that formed the basis for my interviews can be found in Appendix 1.
In Bogotá, I also attended a conference on gender and DDR organized by the UNVMC and the FARC-EP. This was a unique opportunity, as I was the only attendee that was not part of one of these two organizations. Moreover, representatives of almost all 26 Espacios Territoriales de Capacitación y Reincorporación (ETCR) were present. I will further elaborate on these official reintegration zones in chapter four. Finally, I attended numerous lectures and social events related to my research topic in Bogotá and conducted informal conversations with a great number of ex-combatants of the FARC-EP, journalists, non-governmental organization (NGO) workers, activists and researchers. During these research activities, I tried to gather as many relevant documents as possible.
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Apart from the fieldwork in Bogotá, I was able to visit two reintegration sites of the ex-combatants of the FARC-EP in other parts of Colombia. I visited one of the ETCRs, located in the department of Caquetá, where I interviewed seven female ex-combatants. Moreover, I had informal conversations with numerous ex-combatants of the FARC-EP, several employees from the UNVMC and the ARN and an NGO worker who worked on women’s rights issues in the region of Caquetá. The latter offered me the transcripts of an interview with a female ex-combatant of the FARC-EP that reintegrated before the peace process that started in 2010. The other reintegration site that I visited was a more informal one. I visited a group of ex-combatants that left their ETCR because of a lack of suitable land for the cooperative the group wanted to begin: an agricultural cooperative. Therefore, the group decided to rent a piece of land in the department of La Meta and start their agricultural projects on this land, which they called La Pista. I will clarify this aspect of the DDR process, the starting of cooperatives, in chapter four. I spent three days with the group in La Pista, during which I conducted an in-depth interview with one female ex-combatant and a focus group with five other female ex-combatants.
I decided to conduct a focus group because I noticed that some women at this site were reluctant to agree with an individual interview. When I asked, they indicated that they would be more comfortable with a group interview. The focus group thus helped to include the voices of women that would otherwise not have been included in my research. Moreover, the focus group method likely put these women at ease because they together were largely able to decide the direction of the interview, which lowered the risk of the creation of power relations between me as a researcher and them as the respondents. Focus groups were however not my main method, as it can be that participants in focus groups feel more pressured to use a socially desirable narrative than they would feel during individual interviews (Bryman, 2012). Moreover, research participants might not be comfortable with revealing details about their private lives during focus groups. Lastly, the voices of reticent speakers are more likely to be heard during individual interviews than during group sessions (Bryman, 2012). This one focus group, however, helped me to understand how female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP collectively construct meaning around gender roles and gender identity.
Both in the case of the ETCR, where I stayed for five days, and the group in La Pista, where I stayed for three days, I conducted thorough participant observation and had informal conversations with a great number of ex-combatants. I joined the ex-combatants with working on the fields, cooking, washing clothes, eating, community meetings, etcetera. During and after each day I spent with ex-combatants, I made extensive notes about what I observed. The method of participant observation helped me to bring matters into focus that interviewees took for
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granted and therefore did not include in their narrative during the interviews (see Bryman, 2012). Moreover, by participating in their daily activities, I could get into contact and build trust with the ex-combatants. Furthermore, as the researcher-respondent relationship is likely to be less evident during ethnographic conversations than during interviews, research participants may speak more freely and open about the topics and issues of their interest or concern. With some of my interviewees, I noticed that the fact that they were recorded made them a bit nervous, and that they spoke more freely after I had stopped the recording.
After three months of fieldwork, my dataset thus consisted of fifteen semi-structured interviews with female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP and one focus group with another five female ex-combatants. In total, the voices of twenty different female ex-combatants of the FARC-EP who started their DDR process as the result of the peace accord of 2016 are therefore included in this research. For my analysis, I used the qualitative software of Atlas.ti to code the transcriptions of these interviews, together with the interviews with the employee of the ARN and the female ex-combatant of M-19. In this, I followed the process of open, axial and selective coding. The dataset is complemented by my personal notebook of the fieldwork, with notes on informal conversations and my observations and thoughts, the transcript of the life history interview with a female ex-combatant of the FARC-EP who reintegrated before the peace process, the documents I gathered and the photographs I took during the research. These materials mainly serve to understand the context in which the narratives of the research participants are embedded and to improve my interpretation of these narratives. All the photographs that are included in this thesis, including the one on the front page, are taken by myself.
3.2.2. Reflections on positionality
One thing that was clear during my research was that I differed from the research participants in numerous ways. This simultaneously worked against me and for me as a researcher. Because the ex-combatants had disarmed, had regular jobs and wore regular clothes, it was sometimes hard for me to imagine their lives as combatants. Sometimes during interviews, I was suddenly remembered of the kind of lives my interviewees had lived, when they for example addressed the death of their best friends or when they legitimized the killing of citizens that took place during my stay in Colombia. For me it is impossible to imagine what it is like to live in a war, and I think that this sometimes made it difficult to really understand the perspectives and experiences of the ex-combatants. To avoid that the ex-combatants would just see me as some strange outsider that was walking around with a notebook, I tried to blend in with their lives as
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much as possible. I for example worked at the fields, made long walks through the jungle and worked in the household together with ex-combatants. This moreover gave me a better understanding from the ex-combatants’ daily lives than I would have gotten from interviews only.
Sometimes I noticed that being from the Netherlands was actually an advantage. The ex-combatants almost all had a positive image of the Netherlands and assumed that I would understand the struggle of the FARC-EP better than ‘normal Colombians’, who – in their view – would not care about how unequal the Colombian society is, or would not realize that a different, more equal Colombia was a possibility. Finally, gender played a role in my positionality. On the one hand, I felt that the female ex-combatants in general felt more comfortable talking with female outsiders than with male outsiders, arguably because the risk of the creation of power relations between researcher and respondent is bigger when the researcher is male and the respondent female (Bryman, 2012). Moreover, when talking about gender roles, my interviewees often discursively made me part of a collective struggle against the patriarchy, in a narrative of ‘us’ – women – against ‘them’ – men. In this, I thus suddenly became an insider, whereas a male researcher would arguably have stayed an outsider. 3.2.3. Ethical considerations
Diener and Crandall (1978) distinguish four important ethical principles in social and behavioral research: harm to participants, informed consent, privacy and deception. For this research, the aspect of harm to participants is mostly related to safety issues. During the research, I was always very careful with sharing information that could expose who exactly my research participants were. I never told the names of the research participants to others nor recorded their names on tape, except for the few interviewees that were public figures and told me I could use their personal information in my thesis. Not sharing the location of the interviewees was a bit more difficult, because I also always wanted somebody to know where I was for my own safety. Most of the times I told one of my non-Colombian roommates, always a different one, where I was going and how long it would take, without specifying to whom I was going. Moreover, I saved the recordings of my interviews offline, in encrypted files on my computer. I saved the personal information of the interviewees in a notebook apart from the recordings, and the notes of the interview in another notebook. This way I prevented losing all the information at once and the misuse of this information.
Another manner in which research participants can possible be harmed is through talking about experiences that they do not want to talk about. When I asked persons for
