Miranda Alison
Gender, Small Arms and the Northern Ireland Conflict
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‘privatize violence’, with more civilians being drawn into conflicts and the separation of (male)
belligerents and inhabitants breaking down. Concomitantly, the stereotype of aggressive men and
pacifist women is disrupted; particularly in civil wars and wars of liberation, women are also
combatants.
5
The breakdown of the home front/war front boundary in contemporary conflicts
seems to be significant in resulting in increased numbers of female combatants. Nothing could
be further from the truth than Martin van Creveld’s claim that in contemporary intra-state ‘low
intensity’ wars women are staying away from combat roles.
6
Significantly, if we see women as
only victims of, not also as perpetrators of violence and perpetuators of conflict, we have only
part of the story. Simona Sharoni argues that ‘the prevalent view of women as victims of
conflict… tends to overlook, explicitly or implicitly, women’s power and agency.’
7
As Ronit
Lentin points out, ‘[v]iewing women as homogeneously powerless and as implicit victims, does
not allow us to theorize women as the benefactors of oppression, or the perpetrators of
catastrophes.’
8
This prevents us from addressing and responding to the effects of women’s
violence, alongside men’s violence, and makes attempts at peacemaking or peacebuilding, or
post-conflict reconstruction, less effective. A greater acknowledgement and understanding of
women’s participation in political violence is needed as part of an overall struggle towards peace.
As Farr maintains, ‘[f]rames of reference that fail to interrogate the complex roles played by
women, children, and non-combatant men in times of war show an incomplete picture of violent
conflict. This leads to an equally incomplete understanding of how peacemaking should work; as
a result, all too many reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts result in lamentable failure.’
9
As
part of the project to complicate our picture of armed conflict this chapter primarily addresses
the issue of women’s involvement with paramilitary organisations,
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both republican and loyalist,
in the Northern Ireland
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conflict. The chapter draws on fieldwork carried out by myself in
Ireland in 2003, which utilized in-depth semi-structured qualitative interviews with 11 female
former republican paramilitary members, two female former loyalist paramilitary members and
seven others involved to varying degrees with loyalist paramilitary activities. The majority of
interviews were obtained through ex-prisoner organizations, with some accessed through other
community groups. The chapter begins with a very brief outline of the Northern Ireland conflict,
then looks at two significant issues pertaining to small arms and light weapons in Northern
Ireland: the contentious issue of disarmament/decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and the
problem of post-conflict patterns of violence. It moves on to examine women’s role in the
concealment and transport of arms during the ‘Troubles’, then addresses gender relations in both
republican and loyalist paramilitary organisations. It ends with two more speculative sections, on
the sexual appeal of arms and paramilitarism and visual representations of paramilitary women.
Convention