Organizing women for combat: The experience of the FARC in the Colombian war |
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| Authors: | Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín Francy Carranza Franco |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Relaciones Internacionales, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia and Observatorio de Restitución y Regulación de Derechos de Propiedad Agraria, Colombia;2. Observatorio de Restitución y Regulación de Derechos de Propiedad Agraria, Colombia |
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| Abstract: | The FARC, which used to be Colombia's main guerrilla force and is now in the midst of a peace process, was to a great extent a feminized group. This paper discusses why it recruited so many women, and why it recruited them as combatants. We suggest that only when the FARC adopted a highly hierarchical, self‐contained, and militaristic organizational blueprint did it get involved in the massive recruitment of women as combatants. We discuss the way in which organizational mechanisms and ideology interacted to produce such an outcome, and how this interaction marked both the organization and the trajectories of the women who joined it. |
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| Keywords: | FARC female recruitment guerrilla women combatants |
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