Gendering National Liberation: The case of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) Women Fighters

The post-war narratives in the broader post-Yugoslav space have largely omitted the experiences of women during wartime. In the cases when women’s experiences have been centred in wartime, they have been painted either through the lens of victimhood or portrayed solely as peaceful subjects. While there has been a growing body of work on the women’s peace activism during the 1990s, there has been little investigation to the experiences of women in active combat in the post-Yugoslav space. This paper intends to contribute to rectifying this gap in the literature through centering the experiences of the women Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighters during the 1998-1999 war. It aims to explore how the intertwinement between the question for national liberation and gender liberation was negotiated by women KLA fighters through an intersectional lens. It begs the question: ‘How did the intersectional identities of women combatants form their experiences of war?’. Through relying on multi-sited ethnographic analysis, the article aims to unfold the placement and perceptions of womanhood within the KLA's broader goal of national liberation. Specifically, the analysis relies on narrative interviews and personal/community archives from former combatants of the KLA.