Female Combatants after Armed Struggle

"This book stems from a simple 'feminist curiosity' that can be succinctly summed up into a single question: what happens to combatant women after the war? Based on in-depth interviews with forty research participants, mostly former combatants within the Irish Republican Army (IRA), this book offers a critical exploration of republican women and conflict transition in the North of Ireland. Drawing on the feminist theory of a continuum of violence, this book finds that the dichotomous separation of war and peace within conventional approaches represents a gendered fiction. Despite undertaking war-time roles that were empowering, agentic, and subversive, this book finds that the 'post-conflict moment' as experienced by female combatants represents not peace and security, but a continuity of gender discrimination, violence, injustice and insecurity. The experiences and perspectives contained in this book challenge the discursive deployment of terms such as post-conflict, peace, and security, and moreover, shed light on the many forms of post-war activism undertaken by combatant women in pursuit of peace, equality and security. The book represents an important intervention in the field