Public Veneration, Private Denigration: Female Veterans and Rebel to Party Transitions

How do female veterans of former rebel parties navigate their identities after war? Though a wide variety of work has explored the post-conflict lives of female ex-combatants, and scholarship has also considered how veterans sustain post-war politics, these two lenses have rarely been brought together. Building from this literature to provide a more holistic and intersectional approach to the dynamics of post-war veteran identities, we argue that former rebel parties, the public, and veterans are locked in a tense triadic relationship after war. The general public may be eager to get ‘back to normal,’ which requires drawing down wartime deviations from the norm. Rebel parties, in contrast, often depend on the legacies of war to legitimize their role in post-war politics. Female rebels are caught in a situation in which the public levies demands for them to return to their pre-war roles and habits, while their political influence often depends on invoking their veteran status. Thus, while women may be publicly venerated for their participation in rebellion, their identities as veterans can profoundly compromise their personal lives. These female veterans’ experiences underscore an important but underexplored aspect of the post-conflict “patriarchal backlash” that has been widely remarked upon: the libidinal and domestic implications of veteran identity and how these intersect with the public narratives about veterans. We underscore that veterans’ gender and rank influence how their veteran identities are understood by themselves and the community at large. Furthermore, we detail the tensions that individual veterans may feel regarding their individual well-being and experiences and the collective identity of ‘veterans.’ Drawing on interviews with female veterans of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) in Uganda, this article unpacks how female veterans simultaneously enjoy public veneration and private denigration -- and how these contradictory processes affect female veterans’ lives after war.