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Culture, Identity, and Conflict:
The Influence of Gender
Matthew Evangelista
Cornell University
otherland. Mother tongue. The birth of the nation. These common
metaphors suggest an apparent link between gender and ethnic or
~ ~ nationalist movements. Women in general and mothers in particu-
lar are responsible for inculcating the key characteristics that define a
cultural or ethnic identity, including such basics as language, religion,
dress, and cuisine. Women "serve as boundary markers between different
national, ethnic, and religious collectivities" (Kandiyoti, 1991) and thus
might be expected to play an important role when such communities
come into violent conflict. Yet the relationship between gender, identity,
and ethnic or nationalist conflict has received little systematic investiga-
tion. In some recent overviews of ethnic conflict, by anthropologists and
political scientists alike, one cannot even find gender or women in the index
(Eller, 1999; Gurr, 2000~. Nevertheless, a number of scholars have offered
promising hypotheses that link gender to nationalism and ethnic conflict.
The mandate of the group on "culture, identity, and conflict" is to con-
sider "ethnic conflict as an outcome of identity assertion and/or cultural
change," with such developments in turn a possible "consequence of
worldwide political and economic reorganization." Some of the work on
gender and nationalism suggests, for example, that gender identities
might mediate some of the relationships between economic globalization
or religion and ethnic conflict.
Several hypotheses link gender identities to nationalism and conflict.
One set of hypotheses concerns beliefs men and women hold about the
attributes of masculinity and femininity as they relate to ethnic/national-
81
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82
CONFLICT AND RECONSTRUCTION IN MULTIETHNIC SOCIETIES
ist conflict and violence. One common hypothesis about men's beliefs is
that in order for nationalist movements to become militarized, men must
embrace an identity that defines their masculinity as directly linked to the
armed protection of their society's women (Enloe, 1993; Nagel, 1998~.
For women, there are several possibly contradictory hypotheses. The
first is that women must accept their role as the passive, protected seg-
ment of society in order for men to identify successfully with a militarized
masculinity. Thus, in seeking to anticipate, for example, which ethnic
groups might adopt methods of violent secession, one would look to the
groups where women are culturally predisposed to accept submissive
roles.
However, we know from the case of former Yugoslavia that modern
societies with high levels of nominal gender equality (in education, em-
ployment, and the like) can also fall prey to ethnic violence. The Yugoslav
case gives rise to a set of hypotheses that identifies changes in gender
relations as a possible early-warning sign of impending ethnicized vio-
lence. Pressures on women to produce more babies, and consequent limi-
tations on women's reproductive rights, were a significant component of
the nationalist mobilization in Serbia and Croatia, for example. The goals
were generally to increase the population of one's ethnic group vis-a-vis
the others, and in the most militarized versions, to provide future soldiers
for ethnic conflict (Albanese, 1996; Licht and Drakulic, 1996~. That gender
played a role in the nationalisms of former Yugoslavia seemed apparent
also in the conduct of the wars themselves and the extent to which they
entailed organized campaigns of mass rape and other sexual atrocities
(Allen, 1996; Borneman, 1998~.
Contrary to hypotheses associating militarized nationalism with in-
creasing gender inequality are those that see nationalist movements as a
vehicle for improving women's status. With rare exceptions, nationalism
did not play such a positive role in its original nineteenth century Euro-
pean guise (Kaplan, 1997~. Beliefs about the emancipatory potential of
nationalism were, however, more widespread in the anticolonial move-
ments of the second half of the twentieth century (Kandiyoti, 1991;
McClintock, 1996~. And they were especially prominent in the Sandinista
revolution in Nicaragua and the Chiapas rebellion in Mexico (Randall,
1981; Castro, 1995; Poniatowska, 1995; Mora, 1998), even if, in the Sandin-
ista case at least, expectations were disappointed (Randall, 1992, 1994~.
Thus, a further set of hypotheses suggests that women have sometimes
supported nationalist movements, including violent ones, because they
perceived them as likely to advance their collective interests. In some
cases the militarized nationalist struggles themselves provided opportu-
nities for women that would not have been available under peaceful con-
ditions. Thus, in some nationalist or national-liberation movements, as in
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CULTURE, IDENTITY, AND CONFLICT: THE INFLUENCE OF GENDER 83
Algeria or Nicaragua, women have sought equality with men in an ex-
plicitly militarized context namely as guerrilla fighters (Amrane-Minne,
1994; Randall, 1981~. A militarized nationalist movement can apparently
be founded on principles of gender equality as well as on polarized iden-
tities of protective male and protected female. One task of future research
might be to try to identify the conditions under which one dynamic is
more likely than the other.
Looking for early warning signs of the militarization of an ethnic or
secessionist movement is complicated by the range of competing hypoth-
eses regarding gender. We would certainly want to pay attention "when a
community's politicized sense of its own identity becomes threaded
through with pressures for its men to take up arms, for its women to
loyally support brothers, husbands, sons, and lovers to become soldiers"
(Enloe, 1993~. A highly traditional society with distinct gender identities
might be most susceptible to such pressures. But women in a more mod-
ern society could also support a violent secessionist movement if the
struggle itself provided them opportunities for individual empowerment
and if the outcome of national autonomy or independence promised more
egalitarian gender relations than existed under the old order. Studies of
gender roles in advanced industrial societies with separatist movements,
such as Quebec in Canada or the Northern League in Italy, might shed
light on this question (Cento Bull, 1996; LeClerc and West, 1997; Malette
and Chalouk, 1991~.
Hypotheses about the impact on gender relations of the promotion of
religious identity (especially for religions that posit women's inferiority
and subordination to men) and global economic transformations suggest
links between those factors and the propensity for violence (Bookman,
1994; Gagnon, 1994/95; Woodward, 1995~. For example, the 50 percent
unemployment rate for militia-aged young men in Belgrade in 1991, itself
in part a consequence of changes in the international economy, could also
be related to demands for women to stay out of the workforce and have
babies instead. The relationship between desperate economic conditions,
repression of women's rights, religious fundamentalism, and violence-
highlighted most recently in Afghanistan could easily yield more ~en-
eral hypotheses (Mo~hadam, 1997; Pollitt, 2001)
) ) ~
A recent study (Goldstein, 2001) has provided a comprehensive sur-
vey of hypotheses linking gender and war. It constitutes a good starting
point for exploring further hypotheses relating gender to nationalism and
ethnic violence, along the lines suggested in this paper.
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CONFLICT AND RECONSTRUCTION IN MULTIETHNIC SOCIETIES
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
nationalist movements
