Conflict and Feminist Mobilization: Windows of Opportunity or Barriers to Change

A robust body of literature documents the surprising opportunities that war affords women. While still recognizing the tremendous gendered violence and devastation caused by war, scholars demonstrate how armed conflict has the potential to shake-up gender hierarchies, spark grassroots mobilization of women, and to facilitate more gender-equitable institutions and legal frameworks. However, recent scholarship suggests that women’s post-war gains might be short-lived. As Marie Berry (2017) notes, “There is…a ‘stickiness’ to patriarchal power relations: while gender norms are often in flux during periods of war, the legal frameworks and policies designed to protect these gains are insufficient to fundamentally transform women’s lives” (849). These confounding findings point to the varied consequences that war has for women around the world. Despite the rich scholarship on conflict and its effects on women’s lives and gender(ed) power relations, few studies have offered an analysis of how armed conflicts affect an integral mechanism for improving and institutionalizing improvements in the status of women: feminist mobilization. Strong, autonomous feminist movements agitate for social and political change, articulate and elevate the profile of issues that disproportionately affect women and marginalized groups, command public support and attention, and more. Given the integral role of feminist movements in generating change in the status of women, we focus our analysis on understanding how conflict specifically affects feminist mobilization. Our paper draws on both quantitative and qualitative data to examine how conflict affects feminist mobilization. We first quantitatively analyze how conflict affects feminist mobilization in 126 countries across five decades (1975–2015). We then use case studies of feminist movements in post-conflict countries to parse out why conflict affects feminist mobilization in particular ways. Findings from our analyses will advance our understanding of how conflict might undermine or advance opportunities for feminist organizing. Moreover, we contend that understanding how conflict affects feminist mobilization might shed light on the underlying reasons that gains in women’s rights in post-conflict societies may not be long-lasting or permanent.