Women in War: The Micro-processes of Mobilization in El Salvador

by Jocelyn Viterna

Waging war has historically been an almost exclusively male endeavor, yet over the past several decades women have joined insurgent armies in significant and surprising numbers. Why do women become guerrilla insurgents? What experiences do they have in guerrilla armies? And what are the long-term repercussions of this participation for the women themselves and the societies in which they live?

Women in War answers these questions while providing a rare look at guerrilla life from the viewpoint of rank-and-file participants. Using data from 230 in-depth interviews with men and women guerrillas, guerrilla supporters, and non-participants in rural El Salvador, Women in War investigates why some women were able to channel their wartime actions into post-war gains, and how those patterns differ from the benefits that accrued to men. By accounting for these variations, Women in War helps resolve current, polarized debates about the effects of war on women, and by extension, develops our nascent understanding of the effects of women combatants on warfare, political violence, and gender systems.

In the process, Women in War also develops a new model for investigating micro-level mobilization processes that has applications to many movement settings. Micro-level mobilization processes are often ignored in the social movement literature in favor of more macro- and meso-level analyses. Yet individuals who share the same macro-level context, and who are embedded in the same meso-level networks, often have strikingly different mobilization experiences. Only a portion are ever moved to activism, and those who do mobilize vary according to which paths they follow to mobilization, what skills and social ties they forge through participation, and whether they continue their political activism after the movement ends. By examining these individual-level variations, a micro-level theory of mobilization can extend the findings of macro- and meso-level analyses, and improve our understanding of how social movements begin, why they endure, and whether they change the societies they target.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War, Sociology

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gracias Robert este libro me ha cambiado la vida (académica)

[Francisco Herrera · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was incredible for capturing the voices of the women of the FMLN. Jocelyn Viterna does a really good job of showing that women joined the FMLN guerrilla forces in a lot of different ways but still had similar ideas about why they should do so. She comes up with this idea about the "micro-processes of mobilization" as a way to explain the individual (micro) ways that each woman came to join the guerrillas and it works really well because she includes so many quotes from the women themselves that you can actually hear their voices. It's an incredible book for people that are interested in social movements, war and revolution but also if you just like good stories about what makes people do things that might seem unthinkable: why would a young girl choose to pick up a gun and go to war? What is her world like? What are her thoughts? What happens after she decides to go? This book answers those and so many more questions in a clear and engaging way.