Miranda Alison
Gender, Small Arms and the Northern Ireland Conflict
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Gender, Small Arms and the Northern Ireland Conflict
INTRODUCTION
The academic fields studying women, gender, armed conflict, small arms and light weapons are
still relatively new. Thus far, research has tended to focus on women as victims of armed conflict,
which is of course extremely important. There has been a corresponding emphasis on
constructing women as somehow inherently or ‘naturally’ more peaceful, peace-loving and less
violent than men, which has meant that the issue of women as the perpetrators of violence has
been very much neglected. As Vanessa Farr notes, women are often ‘referenced for their
capability to make peace as a supposed organic by-product of their ability to mother and nurture.
These lines of discourse have tended to promote a simple women=peace: men=war dichotomy’.
Farr goes on to contend that ‘[w]e have to question the idea that women are always and only
victims and men always and only perpetrators of violence.’
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However, Cynthia Enloe suggests
that ‘[w]omen in the military has never been an easy topic.’ Challengingly, she states that
‘gradually I began to realize that paying attention only to women as soldiers was simply too
confining…. To invest one’s curiosity solely in women as soldiers is to treat the militarisation of
so many other women as normal. If I slipped into that naive presumption, I probably would be
allowing my own curiosity to become militarized.’
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These are thought-provoking comments and
I do not wish to suggest that stark binary categories of women warriors versus women victim-
peacemakers are the only forms of agency or activism available to women in war; clearly this is
not the case. I also do not wish to suggest that combat is the only role that women have fulfilled
in war or that their other, more common, auxiliary support roles are less significant. Indeed, war
centrally relies on both men and women in a variety of support roles. As Farr notes, one form of
women’s participation in the proliferation and normalisation of guns in the context of armed
conflict is their role in smuggling and hiding weapons and/or their bearers,
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and this is one of the
topics covered by this chapter. Linda Grant de Pauw notes in her history of women in war that
‘[a]lthough some women in war appear in conventional combat roles, most do not. The reality of
women’s experience is distorted by focusing exclusively on exceptional females, but it is also
distorted by focusing only on the most typical.’
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It remains the case that women who engage in
organised violence have been consistently under-examined and that they fundamentally challenge
our enduring image of women as natural peacemakers.
Research on female combatants and women involved in other ways with political violence is
necessary for various reasons. In contrast to conventional wars, many contemporary conflicts
Convention