On the Spatiality of a Political Awakening: Comparing Women’s Spaces of Politisation during Northern Ireland’s Troubles and Palestine’s Intifadas

When talking about political conflict – regardless its form – the first that comes to mind is often its destructiveness in terms of human lives and structural damages. Without getting into platitudes, conflicts are a difficult and sombre time for the ones living it, with often far-reaching consequences on them. However, and it’s a dimension that has yet to be thoroughly explored in academic literature, it might also be a realm of possibilities for a few of them. First and foremost, womankind. Despite a stereotypical representation of women as intrinsic “victims” of political violence, and thus “passive” and second-rate actors of it, reality is much more convoluted. Women have a long story of political involvement. Moreover, conflicts have been known to open new windows of opportunities for women – even if short-timed and sometime depthless – by blurring the lines between the private and the public spheres. As a “transformative event” by definition, times of conflict have matched times of politization regarding women, creating a learning environment for them through a number of peculiar sites. By analyzing three of them – the household, the street and the prison – and comparing how they mirror and differ in two different case studies – Northern Ireland’s Troubles and Palestine’s Intifadas – we aim to examine how these sites influenced the political trajectories of women. In order to achieve this comparison, we’ll rely on interpersonal interviews realized as part of our thesis’s field work, as well as biographical accounts of both conflicts found in archives and other second-hand data.