Militarised Social Reproduction: Women´s Labour and Civil War

What role do households play in sustaining long-term civil wars? That is the key question to be explored in this project.

Using a framework drawn from feminist political economy, this project theorizes the household in a way that contributes to deeper theoretical and empirical analysis of militarization and civil war. It proposes that the everyday gendered work women perform in conflict-affected societies underpins and enables warfare.

This labour is particularly important in civil wars involving non-state armed groups exercising administrative control over a territory.

In these areas, public funds, to the extent that they exist, are spent on maintaining military power and governing bodies, not on welfare.

The project is a qualitative case study, based on a combination of semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and ethnographic research. To enable comparison between cases, qualitative data will be generated in three different parastates in Myanmar.

The aim of the project is twofold: 1) to analyse the relationship between the household, and in particular women´s gendered work reproduced from the household, and civil war; 2) to further advance and refine a theoretical framework aiming at analysing the impact of the gendered household on the outbreak, conduct, and maintenance of parastate armed conflict, developed in the applicant’s doctoral dissertation.

The project is led by a researcher with extensive experience of working in and researching Myanmar.