GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
MSC POLITICAL SCIENCE - INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
THE PATH FROM MOBILIZATION TO
REINTEGRATION OF FARC EX
-GUERRILLERAS
Author: Andrea Torrens Flores Supervisor: Dr. Abbey Steele Second Reader: Dr. Jana Krause
Master Thesis Political Science - International Relations June 22, 2018
Acknowledgments
First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Abbey Steele for encouraging me to go to the field and for her guidance.
I would also like to thank Dr. Jana Krause for taking the time to read this thesis. I am especially grateful to all the people from the ETCR for opening their doors to me and to all the Colombian women who shared their inspiring stories with me.
Abstract
Scholars and practitioners have for the last couple of decades studied and attempted to improve a key mechanism in peace-building processes: the demobilization and reintegration of combatants. However, how the characteristics of an individual influence her/his reintegration remains unclear. In the context of the current reintegration of FARC ex-combatants, this thesis aims to explain the different paths women take in their new lives as civilians. Female ex-combatants from rural backgrounds that underwent the same socialization process inside the insurgent group, react differently in their return to civilian life. This thesis argues that the motives that led to their mobilization into the guerrilla are related to their current behaviour during reintegration. Based on the fieldwork conducted in a demobilization camp, which allowed for an in-depth qualitative study; the findings will show an association between mobilization and reintegration, contributing to the literature that brings back the importance of ideology in explaining civil wars.
Keywords: reintegration, mobilization, female ex-combatants, peace agreement, Colombia, FARC, ideology, civil war
Table of contents
1. Introduction _______________________________________________ 5 2. Literature Review __________________________________________ 7 3. Background ______________________________________________ 11 3.1 Colombia's Civil War ____________________________________ 11 3.2 DDR in Colombia and FARC's Collective Reincorporation ______ 13 4. Methodology _____________________________________________ 17 4.1 Methodological Approach ________________________________ 17 4.2 Case Study Selection ____________________________________ 18 4.3 Fieldwork _____________________________________________ 19 4.4 Ethical Challenges and Considerations ______________________ 21 5. Theory __________________________________________________ 24 5.1 Two Patterns of Behaviour during Reintegration ______________ 24 5.2 What can explain this variation? ___________________________ 28 5.3 Mobilization of Women into Armed Groups __________________ 30 5.4 Two Pathways of Mobilization ____________________________ 33 5.5 Linking Mobilization and Demobilization: the Role of Ideology __ 35
5.6 Before and After the guerrilla: Two Pathways of Mobilization lead to Two Patterns of Behaviour during Reintegration _______________________ 36
6. Discussion _______________________________________________ 50 6.1 Limits of the Theory ____________________________________ 50 6.2 Alternative Explanations _________________________________ 52 7. Conclusion ______________________________________________ 54 Bibliography _______________________________________________ 57 Appendix
Interviews conducted during the fieldwork in the ETCR and Medellin, April/May 2018 ___________________________________________ 61
I. Introduction
On November 24, 2016, the Congress of Colombia ratified the Havana Accord between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the government, with the prospective of putting a stop to more than half a century of conflict. It is an ambitious peace agreement that commits the government to large-scale reforms, with an emphasis in Colombian rural areas. The agreement consists of six main points: agrarian reform, political participation, ceasefire and reintegration, the illicit economy, transitional justice and victim reparation, and verification. One of the crucial points of the agreement for ensuring a long-term and stable peace is the one regarding the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) of FARC combatants. In August 2017, roughly 7000 FARC rebels demobilized and initiated their reintegration into civilian life. Reintegration can become more challenging when the receiving community sees DDR as a mechanism to reward ex-combatants and expresses resentment towards them, as happens in Colombia. There is significant opposition to the agreement from a sector of Colombian society, a fact that was made evident after the plebiscite of 2016, in which the peace agreement was rejected; situation that forced a re-negotiation of some terms of the accord. Less tan two years later, this opposition is represented by one of the preferred candidates to the presidential elections of June 2018. This has created uncertainty about the future of the agreement.
On the other hand, the controversial peace agreement has been praised for being the most advanced in including a gender perspective. During the peace negotiations in Havana, women accounted for 20% of the negotiation table from the government's side and for 43% of the FARC's delegates. This is remarkable taking into account that women have historically been excluded from peace-building processes, since they have been regarded as victims of the conflict and not as a security matter like their male counterparts. Until recently, DDR programs excluded most women combatants because they were not considered soldiers. In the case of the current reintegration of FARC combatants, from which women account for 33% of the demobilized1, they will be equally entitled to the DDR program as men.
1 According to a census realized by the National University of Colombia in 2017. Accessible here:
https://www.elespectador.com/sites/default/files/pdf-file/presentacion_rueda_de_prensa_julio_6_2017.pdf
Additionally, the implementation of the reintegration process is allegedly going to take into consideration a gender perspective. The case of Colombia is an example of how women have been victims, combatants and agents for peace during the conflict.
The adoption of the UN 1325 resolution of 2000 meant a turning point for the inclusion of gender perspectives in international peace and security work. Subsequently, there has also been a growing body of literature studying women's participation in armed groups from different points of view. Works evaluating DDR processes with a gender approach and giving recommendations to improve its implementation have profusely emerged (Mazurana and Carlson, 2004; McKay and Mazurama, 2004; Watteville, 2002). Fewer efforts have been focused on studying how individual-level characteristics determine differences in reintegration. When female combatants that come from similar rural backgrounds, who were members of the same armed group, and consequently underwent the same socialization processes behave differently during reintegration, the following question arises:
What explains differences in the behaviour of women ex-combatants during reintegration?
This thesis takes the case study of FARC collective reintegration in order to give an answer to the research question. The FARC was characterized for having a strong mechanism of formal socialization of combatants, mainly through political education. Therefore, this thesis aims to study how female combatants that were subjected to the same process of socialization during their time in the guerrilla and that have recently demobilized together, develop different behaviours and ways of living during their reintegration into civil society. By doing so, this paper will contribute to a still undeveloped literature that studies female reintegration from a micro-level lens.
This paper engages in a theory-building process that draws from fieldwork research conducted in a FARC demobilization camp in the rural department of Antioquia, Colombia, in April 2018. I have conducted 13 in-depth interviews with ex-combatants and relatives living in the camp and 6 interviews in Medellin with professors, a public official working for the reintegration agency, the coordinator of the gender verification commission of the peace agreement and the coordinator of a women's NGO. The information was gathered 8 months after the start of the reintegration of ex-combatants - the 16th of August 2017 is the official date in which
the government starts to recognize ex-combatants as civilians -, which gives the opportunity to grasp the first insights on the progress of its implementation.
The theory attempts to explain the variation in the patterns of behaviour developed by ex-guerrilleras2 during reintegration by looking at the role ideology played in their mobilization into the guerrilla. Hence, the thesis proposes an association between the motives for joining an armed group and the differences in reintegration, and develops a theoretical approach that links the study of micro-level mobilization with the research on micro-level reintegration, which had not been associated before in the literature. It also expects to contribute to the school of thought that recognizes the importance of ideology to explain civil war. It finally shows how further research on this topic can help understand the disparities in individual DDR processes.
This thesis is comprised of six chapters. In the first chapter, I will examine the existent literature on DDR processes and build my research question from the gap in the literature. Secondly, I will provide a contextualization of the Colombian contemporary civil war with an emphasis on FARC's history as well as an examination of DDR processes that have taken place in Colombia. In this section I will also give some insights on the progress of the current collective reintegration process of FARC ex-combatants. Subsequently, I will introduce my methodological approach and explain my fieldwork research in more detail. Afterwards, I will present the theory that aims to explain the association between mobilization and reintegration of female ex-combatants and I will back it up with the interviews conducted in the field. The discussion of the limits of the theory as well as of the alternative explanations to my dependent variable will go next. Lastly, the conclusion section aims to provide a comprehensive summary of the findings.
2 I will use the term guerrillera to refer to women ex-combatants from leftist armed groups - in most
cases to refer to FARC's -. I do so mainly for a practical reason, as to distinguish between guerrilla (the group) and guerrillero/a (the individual, member of the group)
II. Literature Review
This chapter will go through the existing literature on the DDR and will proceed to explore the academic work on women's reintegration and the study of DDR programs at a micro-level. The literature on female's DDR implementation in the Colombian case will put an end to this first part of the chapter. In the second section of this chapter, I will identify the gap in the literature from which I will formulate my research question.
From the 1990s onwards there has been a proliferation of UN peacekeeping operations that have had the disarmament and disband of warring parties as well as the reintegration of its fighters into civilian life - or what is known as Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration or DDR - as one of its cornerstones (Humphreys and Weinstein, 2007). The third pillar of DDR programs, the reintegration of ex-combatants, although less visible than the other two, is regarded by scholars as crucial for securing a stable peace. As stated by MacKenzie:
The three phases of the DDR were designed with the understanding that peace will not result merely from the removal of guns from the hands of combatants; rather, a regimented process of rehabilitation and societal reconstruction is a prerequisite for a secure nation. (2009, p. 242)
The increasing trend in DDR programs in post-conflict reconstruction has driven scholars to evaluate the determinants of successful reintegration of ex-combatants. However, this literature focuses its efforts on examining the lessons learned from DDR experiences conducted in diverse countries but "few rigorous attempts have been made to identify factors that might explain why some individuals and not others are able to successfully reintegrate after conflict" (Humphreys and Weinstein, 2007, p. 532). This is especially true in the case of the reintegration of women ex-combatants, which has barely been addressed by the DDR literature, with some exceptions (Annan et al., 2011; MacKenzie, 2009; Mazurana and Carlson, 2004; McKay and Mazurama, 2004; Watteville, 2002).
This recent school of thought on women's reintegration shows that women have been left out of DDR programs because they are perceived as victims rather than combatants. MacKenzie argues that the reintegration of male ex-combatants is securitized by governments and international organizations and as a consequence, increased efforts are invested in their reintegration. On the other hand, female soldiers
are not regarded as a security concern in the same way as their male counterparts and this perception has left them out of the political sphere and has framed them into the domestic realm. Given the securitization of development, this has led to men receiving more attention and funding from post-conflict programs (MacKenzie, 2009, p. 243). Her study case is Sierra Leone, which has been praised as one of the most successful DDR programs and which model has been replicated in other countries, such as Liberia, Burundi and Haiti (Humphreys and Weinstein, 2007, p. 563). Despite this fact, she tries to prove how the DDR program failed to include most of the female ex-combatants who experienced the war as soldiers.
On the other hand, most efforts have been focused on recognizing the impacts of DDR programs on ex-combatants. Because of this, the relation between the ability of an ex-combatant to reintegrate and its individual characteristics and experience of conflict has received less attention. Some authors that have paid attention to individual-level characteristics have found that the level of exposure to violence on the part of the ex-combatant and the level of education and wealth prior to joining the armed group, among others, can have an influence in reintegration (Humphreys and Weinstein, 2007; Dyregov, Gjestad and Raundalen, 2002). Humphreys and Weinstein find that "participation in an abusive military faction" hinders social reintegration while a higher level of education and wealth of the individual before being in the armed group negatively affects his later political and economic reintegration (2007, p. 533). Moreover, they do not find evidence that women face more difficulties to reintegrate than men (ibid, p. 562). One of the conclusions of their study is that "aspects of a combatant's wartime history should be taken into account more prominently in the design of DDR programs" (ibid, p. 563).
There is one study that addresses micro-level reintegration with a gendered approach (Annan et al., 2011). Taking the case of Uganda, they examine how the impacts of war on combatants affect their reintegration taking into account the variation in gender. Their study attempts to grasp the gap between combatants and ex-combatants. Moreover, they find that even though women are more affected than men by psychological problems derived from the violence experienced in the armed group, they do not face more difficulties to socially reintegrate. When it comes to the economic and political reintegration, there is an important variation between men ex-combatants and non-ex-combatants, since the latter have less education, experience and wealth than the former, which negatively affects their reincorporation to the labour
market. However, female ex-combatants face the same lack of opportunities as female civilians.
From paramilitaries to guerrillas, there have been several cases of demobilization processes in Colombia, which will be explained in more detail in the following chapter. Because of this, scholars that wish to study DDR processes find in Colombia an abundance of cases. However, once again, there are few scholars that adopt a gendered approach when studying DDR in Colombia, which is striking given the high presence of women in Colombian armed groups, especially in the guerrillas. The existent literature has called attention to the fact that ex-guerrilleras' voices in Colombia have been silenced after demobilizing (Gindele and Rojas, 2018; Londoño and Nieto, 2007) and therefore most authors focus on bringing women's experiences to light (Londoño and Nieto, 2007; Sánchez, 2002). In addition, because the peace agreement of 2016 is a recent event and the process of collective reintegration of FARC ex-combatants has recently started, there are no academic publications on the topic. What has been researched on reintegration focuses either on the collective demobilization of the paramilitary group Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) and other guerrilla groups in the 1990s or on individual demobilization from FARC and ELN.
The most comprehensive work on women DDR in Colombia is the book by Londoño and Nieto (2007), who gather the testimonies of women ex-combatants from different guerrilla movements and give recommendations on how to improve DDR programs in Colombia, as well as how to incorporate a gender perspective in these processes. In the same line of feminist scholars on DDR, they conclude that women and men experience war in a different way and therefore their different needs should be taken into account by DDR programs.
What is missing in the literature?
The literature on DDR has mostly focused on presenting lessons learned exercises from its implementation in different countries. The main body of research has analysed the determinants of a successful reintegration program by assessing DDR programs and giving recommendations to improve them. The same is true for those researchers who have studied women's reintegration; we find many exhaustive recommendations on how to implement a DDR program that incorporates a gender
perspective but it remains unclear the role the characteristics of an ex-combatant play in her reintegration. Therefore, literature has mainly focused on macro-level determinants of reintegration - program design and implementation - but fewer efforts have been directed to describe differences in individual reintegration processes and the possible causes.
This thesis takes the case study of the recent collective demobilization of FARC ex-combatants to study women's reintegration from a micro-level lens. In a group of women that have gone through the same socialization process in the guerrilla and are subject to the same DDR program, how do we account for different behaviours? Having found this gap in the literature I formulate the following research question: What explains the differences in the behaviour of women ex-combatants during reintegration?
It should be made clear that the aim of this thesis is not to evaluate if the DDR program is being implemented successfully, but to give an explanation to differences in the behaviour of ex-combatants that have experienced the same socialization processes inside the armed group.
III. Background
After having stated the research question and before introducing the methods and theory, it is necessary to provide background information on Colombia's contemporary history of conflict. This chapter is composed of two sections. I will start giving a brief contextualization on Colombia's contemporary civil war with an emphasis in FARC. In the second section, I will proceed to explain the DDR processes that have taken place in Colombia, once again highlighting the reintegration process of FARC's guerrilleros based on information gathered during my fieldwork. Throughout the chapter I will also clarify some of the concepts that will be used during the following sections of the thesis.
3.1 Colombia's Civil War
Colombia has witnessed the longest armed conflict in Latin America. Insurgent groups, paramilitaries and state armed forces have been fighting each other for 52 years. According to the National Centre for Historical Memory, around 220.000 people died in the conflict between 1985 and 2012, where 8 out of 10 deaths were civilians and around 5 million people were internally displaced (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2013).
A political agreement between Liberal and Conservative parties put an end to a previous bloody war, La Violencia, which took place between 1948 and 1958-643. However, the structural problems the country faced, such as the concentration of land ownership and the high level of inequality, persisted. This led to the emergence of four main leftist armed groups, the National Liberation Army of Colombia (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN); the Popular Liberation Army (Ejército Popular de Liberación, EPL), the 19th of April Movement (M-19) and the FARC in the 1960s and 1970s. The only guerrilla group that is currently active is the ELN, after the demobilizations of the EPL in 1991, the M-19 in 1990 and FARC in 2017.
In 1982 the first peace talks were initiated between the government, led by Belisario Betancur, and the insurgent groups. Out of the negotiations, in 1985 the FARC and the Communist Party founded the political party Unión Patriótica (UP).
However, more than 3000 leaders and members of the UP were killed, which led to a shift in FARC's strategy that refused to engage in subsequent negotiations. During the 1980s the FARC initiated its military expansion and by the 1990s it 'was a powerful military force engaging in offensive action in more than half of Colombia's municipalities' (Steele, 2017, p. 90). In response to FARC's progress, paramilitary groups emerged regionally to counteract FARC's influence. The period between 1996 and 2002 was the most brutal due to the military strengthening of the guerrillas and the national expansion of the paramilitaries, which consolidated their power with the creation of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC). Significant income provided by drug trafficking permitted the expansion of both groups and their confrontation in contested territories led to the intensification and spread of violence.
In 1998 Andrés Pastrana's administration began talks with FARC while receiving military assistance from the United States through the Plan Colombia. The failure of the negotiation gave way to the election of Álvaro Uribe, who took a hard line to combat the FARC, chasing and killing some of its top commanders. Throughout the war the line between state security forces and paramilitary units has been blurry and there is evidence that in more than one occasion both actors have joined efforts to fight the guerrillas. In addition, Uribe has been accused of having endorsed extrajudicial killings, called falsos positivos, by a policy that rewarded the officers who executed insurgents, which led to the killing of civilians that were subsequently dressed with guerrilla uniforms. The inflated statistics of insurgent’s killings were used to justify US aid (The Guardian, 2018). In 2003 Uribe's administration and the AUC signed an agreement that led to the demobilization of more than 30.000 paramilitaries (OACP, 2005).
Uribe's former minister of defense, Juan Manuel Santos, assumed the presidency after winning the elections of 2010, and having been endorsed by Uribe. In 2011, peace talks between the government and the FARC started and culminated with the signature of the accords in September 2016. However, an important campaign for the no-ratification of the agreement in the plebiscite, led by ex-president Uribe, had a big impact on the population and led to a tight vote in which the 'No' won. The peace agreement was then renegotiated and ratified by Congress in November 2016. In 2017, the FARC demobilized and its combatants started the process of reintegration into civilian life, which will be explained in more detail in the following section. Less
than two years after the ratification of the agreement, an important part of Colombia's population still rejects the accord by arguing that it is too lenient on FARC's combatants. Such discontent was shown in the polls in May 2018, when the conservative candidate to presidency, Iván Duque, came out first with roughly 39 percent of the vote. Duque, who has also been endorsed by former president Uribe, states that the peace deal "awards those who have committed the worse crimes in our history under the abuse of the word peace"4 and advocates to modify some points regarding justice, land reform and drug-trafficking. On June 17th Colombians will have to make a choice between the left-wing candidate Petro, who is a former M-19 guerrillero and supporter of the 2016 peace agreement and the uribista Duque, in a polarized election after which the peace agreement implementation can be affected.
In the view of Claudia Acevedo, professor of the University of Antioquia, expressed in an interview with the author, Colombia is currently in a situation of post-accord and not that of post-conflict, as it is commonly said, since the latter is still latent in the country (May, 2018). The number of paramilitaries, now officially called criminal bands or BACRIM, can still be counted in thousands (FIP, 2017) and the ELN and FARC dissidents' power cannot be diminished either. Moreover, being a social leader in Colombia carries an elevate cost: just in 2017 more than 120 human rights defenders were killed in Colombia (Thomson Reuters Foundation, 2018).
3.2 DDR in Colombia and FARC's Collective Reincorporation
According to the Colombian Reintegration Agency (ACR), which is the governmental body in charge of the implementation of DDR programs, almost 60.000 combatants demobilized between 2001 and 2018 - without taking into account the recent FARC's collective demobilization - and roughly 50.000 engaged in the DDR program.5 There have been two types of demobilization in Colombia: individual and collective. Individually demobilized combatants are the members of a political armed group recognized by the government who individually approach a representative of the state and surrender (Oppenheim et al., 2015, p.804). On the other hand, collective
4 Duque's electoral program: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ivanduquewebsite/static/propuestas.pdf 5
demobilizations occur when an armed group reaches an agreement with the state and all of its members demobilize.
Since the 1990s, Colombia has gone through three major collective demobilization processes. The first wave occurred in the 1990s with the demobilization of the EPL, the M-19 and other smaller guerrillas such as the indigenous Armed Movement Quintín Lame (MAQL). The second collective demobilization was the previously mentioned with the AUC, which took place between 2003 and 2006. It should be noted that until 2016 demobilization processes have taken place amidst continued armed conflict, despite the fact that DDR programs were designed as a post-conflict peace-building mechanism. Ideally, all the warring actors should be included in one sole negotiation and demobilization process, and the non-compliance of this requirement has led to partial and fragmented DDR (Londoño and Nieto 2007, p. 266).
Finally, there is the current process of collective demobilization of FARC combatants. Started in 2017, combatants disarmed and are now enrolled in the process of reintegration. Reintegration is defined by the United Nations (UN) as:
The process by which ex-combatants acquire civilian status and gain sustainable employment and income. Reintegration is essentially a social and economic process with an open time frame, primarily taking place in communities at the local level. It is part of the general development of a country and a national responsibility and often necessitates long-term external assistance. (Secretary-General, note to the General Assembly, A/C.5/59/31, May 2005)6
It is usually divided in three dimensions: economic, social and political reintegration. Economic reintegration involves the provision of economic support. In the case of FARC ex-combatants, economic reintegration entails receiving a monthly pay - roughly the minimum wage - and the provision of investment for the development of productive activities and business plans (its 'profitability' is evaluated by a body formed by FARC and government members). Social reintegration includes psychological assistance, registration in the public health and social welfare system
and access to education. Finally, political reintegration involves political participation in elections but also through different regional and local platforms.
It should be mentioned that in the case of FARC's demobilization, the official documents do not make use of the concepts 'demobilize' and 'reintegrate', since the FARC claims that they will still be politically active and therefore not demobilized. Because of that, the process of reintegration of FARC ex-combatants is officially regarded as reincorporation, which has also driven the ACR to use a new name: Colombian Agency for Reincorporation and Normalization (ARN). According to Francisco Cardona, a public servant working for the ACR, the FARC were reticent to engage in the same DDR program as the paramilitaries and so they imposed some symbolic changes, as well as the creation of the National Council for Reincorporation, which defines the terms of the process and is comprised of two FARC members and two government members (April 2018).
My fieldwork research in Colombia has allowed me to get some insights about the progress in the reintegration process. Eight months after its beginning, around half of the ex-combatants are living in the demobilization camps, officially called Territorial Space for Training and Reincorporation (ETCR, from its Spanish acronym), distributed throughout the country. The rest have moved to live with their families or to search for opportunities in the major cities. On the one hand, the institutional version obtained through the interview with the ACR worker, affirms that the ARN "has implemented 90% of the reincorporation process" and defends that the fact that more than half of the ex-combatants have left the ETCR is not an indicator of the flaws of the program because ex-combatants are free to move around the country and the ETCRs will eventually disappear (Francisco Cardona, April 2018).
On the contrary, when visiting the demobilization camp, the impression is that the implementation of the process has just begun. First of all, physical security has not been guaranteed; even with the constant presence of the police and the intermittent presence of the military, one combatant was killed in the camp and most ex-combatants confess being afraid to leave the ETCR. Secondly, there is a prominent lack of basic services and infrastructures such as roads, phone and Internet connection, health centres and education centres. Thirdly, land redistribution has not been significantly endorsed. The community has been given small lands surrounding the ETCR that are insufficient to act as a supply for the community. Regarding economic reincorporation, there is a lack of working opportunities, since the
community has not yet received any funding for its productive projects. In relation to social reincorporation, the individuals have not been granted any individual psychological attention; there is no assistance for cases of gender abuse or any service for conciliating family and work life. These living conditions are a reflection of life in rural communities in the country, where the guerrilla used to have its strongholds and now there is a vacuum of power that is being contested by other criminal groups. The large-scale reforms and investment the government has committed to endorse in the peace agreement are yet to be seen. Rocío Pineda (May, 2018), in charge of the verification of the accord, and the professors interviewed agreed that the government was not prepared to implement such an ambitious plan but defend that the implementation of the peace agreement - even if slow - is the best option. Moreover, they argue that political will to implement the agreement and invest on reintegration is essential. The teacher working at the ETCR summarized this generalized opinion in one simple statement: We weren't prepared for war and we are not prepared for peace. But it is clear that we prefer to get prepared for peace (Yuli, April 2018).
On a more positive note, some aspects of the reintegration process are progressing and should be mentioned as well. First of all, the ETCR is located right next to a small community of civilians. The acceptance of the community towards the ex-combatants is generalized, and both communities share services such as the school, the church and the health centre. The objective of the peace agreement is that the large-scale reforms implemented improve the life of communities in rural areas, not just that of the ex-combatants. Secondly, even if the ex-combatants are in general terms disappointed with the slowness of the implementation, they are motivated to participate in projects to the extent that most of them agreed to invest part of their monthly pay to start a business plan. Moreover, most of them are studying and some civilians are also benefiting from the access to free education of the reintegration program. Last but not least, some ex-guerrilleras have created a group of women that meets regularly and involves civilian women from the adjacent community.
Taking into account the progress in the implementation of the DDR program, this thesis will discuss how ex-combatants are adopting different ways of living despite being subjected to the same conditions. Before doing so, the next chapter will detail the methodology of this research.
IV. Methodology
In this chapter, I will describe the methodological approach adopted in this thesis, justify the decision as well as stress its implications. I will start by stating the methods used in this thesis and proceed to explain the selection of my case study. After that, I will introduce the source of the data collection, my fieldwork in Colombia, and finish with a segment on the ethical considerations and challenges encountered during the fieldwork. The operationalization of the variables will be included in the following chapter since they emerge as the theory unfolds.
4.1 Methodological Approach
This thesis conducts a qualitative analysis based on the case study of FARC female ex-combatants. The use of the case study approach allows me to get in-depth knowledge from a single unit that can be later generalized to a larger set of units (Gerring, 2004). The variation in this research is found within the unit of analysis, the different patterns of behaviour during reintegration, which defines my dependent variable. The explanation to this variation, observed during intensive in-country fieldwork, could not be found in the existing literature. For this reason, this study engages in an inductive theory-building process, which proposes an association between mobilization and reintegration. Gerring states that adopting a case study approach is particularly well suited for exploratory research:
Yet the very “subjectivity” of case study research allows for the generation of a great number of hypotheses, insights that might not be apparent to the cross-unit researcher who works with a thinner set of empirical data across a large number of units and with a more determinate (fixed) definition of cases, variables, and outcomes. (2004, p. 349).
Since the main purpose of this thesis is not to verify a hypothesis but rather to propose a new theory that can be subsequently subjected to more rigorous analysis, I argue that this methodology is the most convenient to achieve my goals. Hence, this thesis does not aim to test a causal effect, for which a quantitative methodology would be more adequate, but to bring up a theory that explains a plausible association in a
relatively new topic area. In order to do so, I construct a theory making sure that is falsifiable, so further research can test it.
The main drawback of this approach is the difficulty to generalize to other cases. Even though I provide plausible support to my theory through my fieldwork findings, further empirical research will have to be conducted as to see if the theory is applicable to other contexts.
4.2 Case Study Selection
When I started to read on women's participation in armed groups, the leftist Latin American guerrillas drew my attention. The significantly high presence of women in Colombian guerrillas and the recent demobilization of around 7.000 FARC ex-combatants - among which 33% are women, according to the census conducted by the National University of Colombia (2017)7 - made it seem like a good choice for
fieldwork research. Moreover, the allegedly paradigmatic gender approach of the novel peace agreement made it more attractive to be considered as a case study. However, I encountered two main obstacles. First of all, the literature on DDR rarely adopts a gendered approach, so there were not many studies on which to draw. Secondly, my fieldwork would be conducted less than a year after the beginning of the process of reintegration, which made it unsuitable to be evaluated in conclusive terms. Despite these two factors, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to grasp the first post-peace process insights. Therefore, I resolved to start my fieldwork with an open and modifiable research question that would be adapted during my data collection process, taking advantage of the flexibility my methodological approach allowed me to have. Finally, being a Spanish native speaker also led me to consider doing fieldwork in a Latin American country in the first place.
The temporal and practical constraints of a Master Thesis led me to focus in a particular area of Colombia, starting my journey in Medellin. My first thought was to get in touch with ex-guerrilleras that lived in the city but getting access to them proved to be difficult and time consuming. One possible explanation for this is that there is still stigma around the fact of being a demobilized person and above of all, the physical integrity of ex-combatants is not entirely guaranteed. Following an official
7 https://www.elespectador.com/sites/default/files/pdf-file/presentacion_rueda_de_prensa_julio_6_2017.pdf
report by the UN verification mechanism from May 2018, 44 FARC ex-combatants and 18 relatives have been killed as well as 6 ex-combatants enforced disappearances have been reported since the signature of the peace accord (InSight Crime, 2018).
After the first interview with an ex-guerrillera in Medellin, I was granted access to a demobilization camp. Since I could not have predicted the possibility to have a first-hand experience of living in a demobilization zone, my access there totally influenced my research. I decided to live there for a week, during which I was able to observe the daily lives of the ex-combatants, to hear about their experiences in the guerrilla and their future plans as civilians. Besides the crucial information for my research gathered through the interviews with the ex-guerrilleras, living there also allowed me to absorb valuable information from daily interaction with the community.
4.3 Fieldwork
My data has almost entirely been collected during my fieldwork in Medellin and rural Antioquia from April 7th to May 3rd 2018. The fieldwork has enabled me to frame my analysis around a primary source of information and therefore to get original content beyond the existing literature. The data gathered consists of 19 interviews8, informal conversations and participant observation. Interviews were conducted in Medellin and in the demobilization camp.
I first contacted the Colombian Reintegration Agency (ACR), which is the governmental body in charge of the implementation of the DDR program. They could not grant me access to demobilized FARC individuals without an official request that needs to be filled one year in advance. Nevertheless, I was given access to interview one of its officials at the regional headquarters in Medellin, whose testimony and opinion served to obtain the institutional view on the collective process of reintegration of FARC ex-combatants and its alleged gender perspective. While in Medellin, I also interviewed three professors and researchers on the Colombian conflict, two of them specialized in gender, which provided me with in-depth knowledge on relevant topics such as their opinion on the current and previous implementations of DDR programs and the situation of the rural woman in Colombia.
Two more interviews add to the list of consultancy with experts: the coordinator of a recognized women's organization platform in Antioquia and the coordinator of the special agency on gender inside the Monitoring and Evaluation Commission of the peace process. Both interviews provided me with valuable insights on the application of the gendered approach in the peace agreement, and on how the inclusion of women in the Colombian peace process was achieved by the unwavering activism of women's civil society organizations.
After interviewing the first ex-guerrillera, who also works for the ARN, in Medellin I was offered the opportunity to be introduced to the community of ex-combatants by her, whom the whole community knows and trusts. Since the FARC was prominently a rural guerrilla, the demobilization camps are situated in rural areas of Colombia. Even though this implied leaving the relative security of Medellin to move to a still conflicted rural area, I considered the trade-offs and decided to move and base most of my research on my findings there.
Figure 1 shows a map with the 26 demobilization camps in Colombia where FARC ex-combatants have been living since August 2017. The region of Antioquia is the one that has more ETCRs, probably due to the important presence the FARC has had in the rural department. My fieldwork was conducted in one of them, whose name will not be mentioned for privacy reasons and where the ex-combatants of one former front are living. According to the FARC ex-commander living in the ETCR, there initially were 357 demobilized combatants in this camp, from which 120 still live there.9 In the ETCR I conducted the other 13 interviews. Nine interviews are with former FARC combatants, one with a miliciana10, two with ex-combatants' relatives and one with the teacher of the ex-combatants.
All the interviews were conducted in Spanish and all the translations are mine. The interviews were recorded with the permission of the respondents and were performed in the house of the respondents or in a common area in the ETCR. In order to preserve the interviewees' anonymity, I use pseudonyms in the case of the ex-combatants and civilians from the ETCR. I conducted semi-structured interviews, in which I followed the respondents in their narrative while making sure we were talking
9 Since there is no official public data from the government on the number of demobilized per ETCR
this is my only source
10 Miliciano/a was the name given to FARC collaborators who did not join the fronts, but stayed in the
about the list of topics relevant for subsequent comparison and analysis. The narratives of female ex-combatants assembled by Londoño and Nieto (2007) and Herrera and Porch (2008) have been used to verify that my interviews are in line with experiences from other ex-combatants in order to guarantee its reliability.
Conducting fieldwork has allowed me not only to get first-hand interviews but also to be in a constant process of observation and learning. Along with the interviews, I have obtained valuable information from two other sources: informal conversations and participant observation. Informal conversations were held with psychologists working in the ETCR, several ex-combatants and relatives, civilians from the adjacent community and the ex-commander of the front, among others. Participant observation refers to my participation in the daily lives and activities of my respondents, which go from having lunch with them to attending one of their assemblies, which reunited leaders and ex-combatants to discuss future perspectives in the ETCR. Finally, during my stay in Medellin I attended some events that contributed to my knowledge on the current peace-building process, such as a conference on the National's Victim's Day and the conference "Los inconclusos del acuerdo", on the non-compliances of the Peace Agreement, where members of the National Council for Reincorporation, such as FARC leader Pastor Alape, discussed the progress in the implementation of the Peace Agreement.
4.4 Challenges and Ethical Considerations
The main challenge I faced throughout the fieldwork was to get in touch with ex-guerrilleras that were willing and available to be interviewed during my short stay in the country. Even once I moved to the ETCR I wandered around the community participating in the day-a-day activities, and it was not until a couple of days later that I gained their trust and they came to visit me for the interviews or I was allowed into their houses. Some FARC ex-combatants are still very reticent to talk and especially to be publicly recognized as having belonged to the armed group. Because of that, I always stated my purely academic intentions and assured them that their names were not going to be made public. In addition, interviewing women was even more of a challenge because the interaction with men happened without planning it, as they would be spending time in the public areas, while women would spend more time at home, attending school or going from one place to another.
Another concern I had at the beginning of my stay was the attitude FARC leaders would adopt towards my presence and objectives in the ETCR. Even though the guerrilla is no longer a reality and the figures of commanders have disappeared, the dynamics of authority prevail to some extent. However, I always felt welcomed by the community and its leaders. My first contact in the ETCR, who is the head of Communication of the FARC there, introduced me to the women who were willing to share their experiences with me, as well as encouraged the rest to do so. I also contacted the ex-commander of the front and now leader of the ETCR to let him know about the reasons for my presence there as well as my goals. In the following assembly with the ex-combatants, which I was allowed to attend, he encouraged the women to share their stories with me while emphasizing the need for these stories to be told, especially when the role of women in FARC has been, in his opinion, manipulated.
Furthermore, it proved challenging to avoid getting too involved in the community life and having to leave the demobilization camp after having obtained information with the feeling of not being able to give anything in exchange.
A more practical challenge was in regards to the conditions in which the interviews were conducted. Since I was living in the community I would completely adapt to the respondents, which resulted in conducting interviews with women carrying a baby or cooking a soup while some cumbia music would start to play in the middle of the interview, which made us have to go ask the neighbours to lower the volume.
Finally, I faced the challenge of putting my own security at risk by travelling to the ETCR and living there. Despite the peace agreement, Colombia still struggles to transition to peace and there is an important presence of paramilitaries as well as FARC dissidents and the still active guerrilla ELN in some areas. The confrontation between the different actors is accentuated in rural areas. In the way from the village to the ETCR I needed to take a transport that takes around three to four hours until the military checkpoint at the entrance of the ETCR. I was aware that the territory between these two points was critical so I followed the indications and advices in order to minimize the risks. All of the related above contributed to reinforce the idea that the government has not yet the monopoly of security in some rural areas, in which just from travelling there your physical integrity is threatened.
Lastly, since I was aware I was working with human subjects I took into account ethical considerations. I always made sure to obtain the consent of my respondents to be interviewed after explaining the purpose of my research and I let them know they were free to ask me to stop the interview at any moment if they were not feeling comfortable.
Figure 1: Distribution of ETCRs in the Colombian territory. Source: ACR
V. Theory
In this section I aim to give an explanation to the variation in the behaviour of women ex-combatants in the first phase of reintegration, which constitutes the dependent variable in this research. In order to do so, I will start explaining the two patterns of reintegration observed during my stay in the ETCR and through the information gathered in the interviews. Afterwards, I will build my theory in an attempt to give an explanation to such variation. In other words, I will give an answer to my research question: What explains differences in the behaviour of women ex-combatants during reintegration?
This chapter is divided into six sections. To begin with, I will describe the two main paths taken by female ex-combatants during reintegration by drawing on five factors that are pivotal to explain them. I will proceed to discuss what can account for this variation. Afterwards, I will present my independent variable, mobilization, as a possible explanation and argue why I find it convincing, while turning to existing literature on women's mobilization into violent political organizations. I will proceed to search for a precedent in associating mobilization and demobilization in previous literature. Finally, I will introduce my theory and conceptualize it with the information obtained during fieldwork.
5.1 Two Patterns of Behaviour during Reintegration
During my stay in the ETCR and through the interviews conducted there, I observed five variables that played a key role in the reintegration of women ex-combatants and therefore shaped their behaviour and lifestyle during reintegration.
a. Maternity:
Since the signature of the peace agreement there has been a FARC 'baby boom', meaning that the birth rates among ex-combatants have been increasing. This is partly due to the fact that the FARC had very restrictive rules regarding pregnancy, which in most cases consisted on a ban on having babies during wartime. There was a strict contraception policy based on injections and all women were subjected to it once they joined. In case of pregnancy, the baby was given to family members outside the FARC or to a peasant family. In some cases, women had to undergo an abortion.
Some women that demobilized before the peace agreement reported being forced to have abortions (The Guardian, 2015). Yet all the women interviewed for this thesis justified FARC's birth control policy by saying that "when a woman joined FARC she was aware that she would not be able to have children because maternity and war are not compatibles" (Marta, April 2018). Still, some of them criticized the fact that exceptions were made with the commander's partners. From the moment the ceasefire was established the situation started to change. "With the ban lifted, women and couples have given in to their long-repressed desire to become parents. Some 60 babies were born during the peace process" (The Guardian, 2017).
This variable has an important role in defining life after the guerrilla. In such crucial moments in which one's future life will be shaped, having children implies having to dedicate most efforts to them, especially in the case of women. Even though some of the respondents argued that children were taken care of equally by women and men, it was clear that mothers spent most of their time taking care of their children and of housework. In addition, pregnancy can be seen as a come back for women ex-combatants to the traditional role of rural women. As stated by a senior official of the International Organization for Migration and captured by Herrera and Porch "the sense of hopelessness of adolescent females in many rural areas of Colombia is amazing. They have no dream, no idea that they can succeed in a normal life. Pregnancy is the only way they can reassure themselves of their identity" (2008, p. 611). Hence, I argue that the decision to have children during the first phase of reintegration influences women's reintegration because it implies that they have less time to study and seek for economic autonomy and it increases the possibilities to reassume their traditional role as housewives.
b. Relationship status:
During the guerrilla, both men and women were free to choose their sexual partners, as long as they engaged in heterosexual relationships. Moreover, "the constant transfer of personnel between companies and fronts made stable relationships almost impossible to maintain" (ibid., p. 624). In my interviews, the ex-combatants referred as having had between two and four compañero sentimental, a name given to the sexual partners with whom they usually shared the tent.
However, some of the relationships have survived the guerrilla years and continue in the new civilian life. In fact, during reintegration, most of the women
living in the ETCR share their house and life with their compañero from the guerrilla. However, in the absence of the strict guerrilla rules and mandates, there has been a return to the traditional family structure. While in the guerrilla tasks were equally distributed and both women and men had to assume duties that went from fighting to cooking, housework is mainly carried out by women in the ETCR. Following a similar argument than in the case of maternity, the decision whether or not to live with a compañero has implications for women's reintegration, since it reinforces the comeback to a traditional family structure.
c. Education:
The guerrilla is the scenario in which some of the ex-combatants learnt to read and write, while some basic education on the history of Colombia as well as political training was provided. Furthermore, they were trained in some skills related to communication, nursery and accountability. But back in civilian life, most of them do not have any title that accounts for their education and training.
The reintegration program gives them access to free education. Javier Cardona, ACR worker previously mentioned, explained the objectives of the program in an interview with the author:
We expect that they take advantage of these two years, during which they will be receiving a basic income, to focus on their education so that they can compete with other workers once the economic support is over. (...) I would say that in these first 8 months of reincorporation, the emphasis has been made in the educational field. (23 April 2018)
Thus, prioritizing education during the first years of reintegration can have a positive influence in the latter incorporation to the labour market of ex-combatants. It also implies interacting with the community and the reinforcement of self-confidence by feeling able to finish their studies.
d. Economic initiative:
Even though the funding of businesses and projects in the demobilization camps has not arrived in most cases, some ex-combatants are joining efforts to build initiatives that can be later assessed as profitable. These projects will probably constitute the
greater working resource in the community, since there are not major alternatives, given the isolation of the rural camps.
Therefore, I argue that engaging in some of these named productive projects implies seeking for economic autonomy from an early stage, which can shape the future professional and economic lives of the ex-combatants. Moreover, participating in such projects implies an interaction in the community, which can lead to assuming positions of leadership and being a visible member of the community.
e. Association:
The creation of women's organizations, even if their objectives are not political, leads to the creation of a network of individuals with common objectives, which enhances participation in public affairs, a network in which women help each other and can create dynamics of empowerment. It is also a way for women to be more visible in the community and to defend their own interests. Therefore, an association of women in the community can work as a platform to support each other and express their interests.
After having introduced the five factors we can group them in the three main points of every reintegration process. First of all, maternity and relationship status would be regarded as part of the social reintegration. Secondly, education and economic initiative would contribute to the analysis of economic reintegration. Finally, association would be understood as part of the political reintegration.
These five variables interact with each other in different ways. For example, an ex-combatant can be pregnant, live with her compañero and study while not being engaged in any economic initiative or association. Yet there are two patterns of interaction that are the most common, which divert into the two patterns of behaviour during reintegration:
I) Reassuming the traditional role of the rural woman.
In this first pattern of reintegration the first two variables, maternity and living with a partner, play a major role. In Colombia's rural society, most men do not take responsibility for their duties as fathers, and households were women assume all the responsibilities are the norm. Therefore, women in this category can be studying or working in the field in some cases but have to assume most of the home keeping and childcare, which takes a lot of their time. Their life perspective is having a family and
in general terms they have few aspirations to keep studying beyond the basic level provided by the reintegration program, nor to get involved in economic projects. Finally, they are not very participative in the public life of the community and they rarely attend the meetings organized by the representatives of the demobilization camp or by external institutions.
II) Challenging the traditional role of the rural woman.
In this second pattern of reintegration the three last variables, education, economic initiative and association play a more important role. Even if some of the women might be living with their partner or with the children they had before joining the guerrilla, pregnancy is not their main objective at the moment. They are rather focused on their studies and more participative in the community life through their involvement in economic initiatives and their attendance to meetings organized by political or non-governmental actors, as well as holding gatherings with other women in the community. Some of them have taken a stand on being single in order to concentrate on their professional, political and personal development. To some extent, this implies that living with a partner and having children in rural Colombia is hardly compatible with the pursuit of other personal goals.
For some women, reintegration implies going back to Colombia's traditional society, in which the roles for men and women are not equally distributed by a strict code of rules. For most of them, it is the opportunity to finally fulfil their wish to have a family without having to run from bombings. It should be made clear that this thesis aims to show a variation in the behaviours of ex-guerrilleras but does not argue that one pattern of reintegration is more 'successful' than the other.
In the next section, I will aim to give an explanation to such variation in the behaviour of women ex-combatants that have in most cases for not less than ten years, received the same ideological education, obeyed the same mandates and gone through the same socialization processes.
5.2 What can explain this variation?
As seen in the literature review section, there is not much written about the micro-level causes of a successful reintegration of female ex-combatants and most of the literature are context-specific lessons learned exercises. Moreover, as stated before,
this thesis does not aim to assess the determinants of a successful reintegration, and even if it expected to do so, the case study of this thesis would not be appropriate for such purpose, since eight months of reintegration is too early of a stage to judge its output. Accordingly, neither of the two reintegration patterns is considered to be more successful than the other but they can help understand how women that have undergone the same socialization process in their guerrilla years and who are now going through the same DDR program are choosing different ways of living. Furthermore, this variation is observed in women that were in the same front before demobilizing and who have been living in the same demobilization camp since then.
Thus, how can we explain the variation in the behaviour of these women? We can search for some insights in previous studies. Humphreys and Weinstein brought up three individual-level factors that influence reintegration: participation in an abusive military faction, level of education and level of wealth. First, they find that having been in an abusive military faction hinders social reintegration. This factor does not explain our variation, since women from the same front are behaving differently (and there is no evidence in the interviews that they faced different levels of violence when they switched fronts). Secondly, they argue that individuals with a pre-war higher-level of education and wealth faced more difficulties in their political and economic reintegration. These two variables could have an effect in women's behavior during reintegration but the logic would be different: 'women with a pre-war higher education and wealth levels tend to adopt the second pattern of reintegration, i.e. challenging the traditional role of the rural woman'. We would find support for this argument in Londoño and Nieto's differentiation between urban and rural guerrilleras, since the first ones usually have a higher level of education. However, since all the ex-combatants in the demobilization camp - and the majority of FARC ex-combatants - came from isolated rural areas with low state presence, there is no significant variation in their level of studies. The same is true for the wealth level, since they all come from poor rural households. Finally, Annan et al. find that females who bore children inside the rebel group are less likely to return to school after demobilizing (Annan et al., 2011: 892). Londoño and Nieto arrive to a similar conclusion. Again, the FARC case is very specific in this regard, since most guerrilleras did not have children during their years in the guerrilla. This is the reason why most of them are having children after demobilizing. On the other hand, two of
the guerrilleras that live with the children they had before joining the front, are among the most active figures in the community.
Therefore, I am faced with inconclusive literature that does not fully explain my case study, partly because literature on the individual-level determinants of women's reintegration is very scarce. Humphreys and Weinstein's article is the most useful precedent but their study is generalized to men and women ex-combatants and focused in the case of Sierra Leone. On the other hand, studies that pay attention to women's reintegration have a focus on the implementation programs and how to improve them, also in the Colombian case analysed by Londoño and Nieto. This does not mean that the factors mentioned do not have any influence in the differences in women's behavior during reintegration, but they fail to give a complete illustration of the causes.
Leaving aside what we can deduce from previous literature, some other factors can be logically associated with the two paths of reintegration. For example, variation in the guerrilla experience of women, such as the ranks they assumed or the ranks of their partners could have an influence in their current life. These alternative explanations will be discussed in the Discussion section.
Having found this gap in the literature, which is insufficient to interpret the different behaviours women follow during reintegration, I argue that there is a variable that has not yet been linked to reintegration and can be explicative to some extent. My theory suggests that the variation in the motivations to mobilize is related to the variation in behaviours during reintegration. Therefore, my independent variable is mobilization.
In the next section, I will briefly review the literature on women's mobilization into armed groups and I will proceed to introduce the link between the two variables that will be further illustrated in my theory.
5.3 Mobilization of Women into Armed Groups
This section will examine the theoretical contributions on the mobilization of women into armed groups. Subsequently the literature will be linked to the theory, which will be introduced in the following section.
Even though some of the main motivations to mobilize, such as poverty and lack of life alternatives, are found in both men and women, it is relevant to study how
some circumstances that mainly affect women, such as domestic abuse, can have an effect in their life decisions. As mentioned before, the traditional literature on war and conflict has regarded women as victims. For this reason, aspects of women's engagement in war that imply seeing them as active actors have remained largely unexplored. This has started to change in the last decades with the emergence of a diverse body of literature that tries to explain the increasing presence of women in guerrilla organizations. There are comprehensive studies on women's participation in violent political organizations (Thomas and Bond, 2015), on the motivations for a rebel group to recruit women (Wood and Thomas, 2016; Gutiérrez and Carranza, 2017) and on the role of women inside revolutionary groups (Herrera and Porch, 2008), to name some examples. Regarding mobilization, there is a growing corpus that attempts to explain the participation of women in Latin American guerrillas (Kampwirth, 2002; Luciak, 2001; Vásquez, Ibañez and Murguialday, 1996; Viterna, 2006).
Kampwirth draws a detailed picture of the multiple determinants that affect women's participation in revolutionary organizations through her study of Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico and El Salvador. She classifies these determinants in four sets of factors, which combined lead to mobilization: structural changes, such as migration to the cities; ideological and organisational changes, like the emergence of religious organizations; political factors, as the state repression of these forms of peaceful mobilization; and personal factors, like family networks of activism (2002). Her work concludes that the paths followed by women in mobilization are similar to the ones taken by men.
In their study of the role of female fighters in FARC, Herrera and Porch also comment on the motivations for joining while contributing to the literature with a final reflection on the topic. In line with Kampwirth, they present a myriad of reasons that lead to mobilization and include poverty, lack of education, high presence of the guerrilla in the territory, fulfilment of childhood ambitions and lack of life alternatives. They conclude that "the limited opportunity and autonomy offered to women in the highly patriarchal Colombian society means that young campesinas are particularly vulnerable to FARC recruitment campaigns" (2008: 611). However, the reasons they mention are very similar to the mobilization paths taken by most individuals, regardless of their gender. Therefore, it remains unclear how the patriarchal structure makes women particularly vulnerable.
