Gendered and militarized landscapes: Theorizing rural revolutions in Colombia, India and Myanmar

This paper speaks to the section segment ‘Gendered experiences of conflict and displacement’. It delves into the intimate, embodied, and gendered spaces of violence and resistance in militarized landscapes in Colombia, India and Myanmar. Building on the authors’ extensive research experience on gender, land, and war in those countries, the paper theorizes rural women’s experience of revolutionary politics, producing an analytical framework to uncover how gender power relations are implicated in contemporary rural warfare expandable to the study of other armed conflicts at the global scale. In recent rebel warfare, military violence has been disproportionately concentrated in rural landscapes (Elfversson & Höglund 2021), structured by intergenerational gendered relations of power and labor. These terrains and relations both shape and are shaped by the ways in which wars are experienced and made sense of. Yet a dominant focus on measuring battle-related deaths and violence or the transformation of environments obscures the ways in which security and resistance are implicated in gendered and spatialized relationships. This paper addresses this gap. Theoretically, the paper sits at the intersection of Feminist War Studies and Feminist Political Geography. Through the concept of “infrastructures of intimacy” (Amrow 2017), the paper explores the gendered and spatialized relationships through which home, nation, and security are reproduced in times of (post)war. It operationalizes ‘infrastructures of intimacy’ through attention to gendered relations of land (Faxon 2020); labor (Hedström 2022); and love (Anctil Avoine 2022) to theorize revolutionary women’s experiences of violence and resistance in militarized landscapes. Methodologically, the paper takes a comparative multi-case qualitative design, focusing on Colombia, India, and Myanmar where long-standing conflicts are fought across rural landscapes, where war is not just an event, but a condition of life. The focus is on three periods. In India, the left-wing insurgency is taking place within a “democracy,” with Naxalite fighters engaged in resistance (since 2014); in Myanmar, decades of civil war involving multiple ethnic armed groups has been followed by a recent country-wide revolution (since 2021); and in Colombia, the long duration and multiple armed groups fighting the state have now moved into a post-peace agreement phase (since 2016).