"Revolutionaries do not rape": Mapping Grammars of Gendered Violence and Control in the FARC

During Colombia’s civil war, the FARC established a complex gendered order within its ranks and civilian communities. This involved a range of policies and norms, including prohibiting rape, sanctioning domestic abuse, and subjecting women combatants to forced contraception and abortion. Given the Marxist-Leninist insurgent group’s claims to fight for women’s rights, the organization’s efforts to protect women from rape while simultaneously subjecting them to reproductive violence is puzzling. Motivated by this paradox, this paper investigates how FARC combatants arrived at and reconciled seemingly contradictory understandings, scripts, and justifications of conflict-related sexual and reproductive violence. Drawing on 95+ semi-structured interviews, primarily with FARC ex-combatants, it shows how grammars of violence deployed social categories—at times diverse, overlapping, and conflicting—to establish a new gendered order. Realizing this order relied on an embodied process that organized gendered bodies in specific, often violent, ways. These practices marked a clear rupture from pre-existing gendered norms and behaviors, but in other respects traditional gendered scripts persisted and were perpetuated through the disciplining of women’s bodies. This analysis sheds light on power of gendered interpretive frameworks in justifying, motivating, or discouraging particular forms of violence, as well as imbuing violent acts with variant social meanings and impacts.