Militarised Familial Ties and Women’s Participation in Fighting Forces: Insights from Bosnia & Herzegovina

Family, as a gendered social institution, plays a crucial role in enabling war both symbolically and materially. Feminist scholarship has long highlighted that military and political leaders mobilise familial language and images – such as the image of the nation as a family (McClintock 1993) – to rationalise and legitimise armed conflict. Moreover, family is a site of everyday social reproductive labour, which is integral to sustaining war (Hedström 2020). Nevertheless, research on women’s participation in wartime fighting forces often depicts family as a barrier to the involvement of women in armed struggle, rather than an enabling mechanism. In contrast, this paper explores how family may enable (as well as constrain or thwart) women’s participation in fighting forces, e.g. by providing the affective bonds and practical support that make soldiering possible. This paper draws on long-term research in Bosnia & Herzegovina, including in-depth interviews with women who joined armed groups during the 1992-95 war. It extends and builds on recent theorisation of militarised familial ties – which conceptualizes familial ties as affective bonds that both emerge through, and are transformed by, war’s violence - to unpack the crucial connections between family and armed conflict (Ketola and O’Reilly 2025). Familial ties include not only biological ties (to parents, siblings, children), and relationships recognised by law (e.g. marriage and adoption), but also ties to chosen family (people who are viewed as family because of the love, care, and support they provide). My focus is on militarised familial ties - familial ties that are constituted through the violent and coercive conditions of armed conflict, and/or transform as violence unfolds. Overall, this paper suggests that militarised familial ties shape women’s participation in armed groups in several important ways. Zoning in on armed group processes – such as the recruitment and retention of fighters, and disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) - my analysis offers crucial insights into the enlistment of female fighters, their sustained engagement over time, and their withdrawal from fighting forces.