‘Like flesh and a nail’: rethinking the nexus of familial ties and armed conflict

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This article advances a feminist theorization of the critical nexus between family and armed conflict. It does so by examining the relationship between familial ties and women’s participation in fighting forces. We focus on two key questions: What are the familial ties that are constituted through conditions of war? And how do these ties shape women’s participation in armed groups, in various forms? Critical IR and feminist scholarship recognize that family sustains war symbolically and materially. Yet, what is missing is a theoretical conceptualization of the relationship between the diverse ties that constitute family in contexts of war and women’s participation in armed groups. Our novel framework – of militarized familial ties – conceptualizes familial ties as affective bonds that both emerge through and are transformed by war’s violence. This dynamic framing allows us, first, to systematically illustrate how familial ties shape key processes pursued by armed groups, including the recruitment and retention of fighters. And second, our framing offers crucial new insights into how the political subjectivities of women fighters intersect with familial ties. We offer a new typology of militarized familial ties to illustrate how pre-existing and emergent familial ties both condition, and are conditioned by, women’s participation in armed groups. We demonstrate the wider implications of our theoretical intervention by reflecting on long-term field research conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Nepal.