The unspoken red-line in Colombia: Gender reordering of women ex-combatants and the transformative peace agenda

Abstract

Academic perspectives on women in conflict have been consistently moving away from the reductionist narrative of victimhood or deviation from gender norms. Yet, this narrative is still predominant in humanitarian discourses, while it is assumed that women’s participation in peacebuilding derives from their natural proclivities. These narratives, we argue, reinforce the gendered patriarchal post-conflict order as ex-combatant women are pushed into traditional roles through reintegration processes without addressing gendered structural and systemic violence. This article is based on the Colombian case, where a peace agreement in 2016 marked the official end to decades of conflict between FARC-EP rebels and the government. While deep changes were promised, the reality for women ex-combatants has been – despite unprecedented levels of women’s participation – a reordering into traditional roles and a reinforcement of conjugal order rather than a transformative progression towards peacetime emancipation. We argue that, while the government claimed that the economic and political systems were non-negotiable red-lines, there was also another unspoken red-line: that of gender roles. This article argues that addressing the gendered structural roots of conflicts in order to build sustainable peace requires a decisive participation of women, including former rebel combatants whose potential contribution to transformative peacebuilding are often ignored.

Introduction

I loved to see the guerrillas around, particularly the lasses, because their hair was divine. They were all very pretty, and I loved the way they organised a meeting and everyone listened to them very carefully. (Young peasant woman in Puerto Asís, Putumayo. 26 June 2015)

Over the past decade, depictions of female ex-combatants have been consistently moving away from the caricature of agency-lacking victims compelled to fight by deception or coercion and subject to sexualisation or infantilisation. The diverse roles that women have played in a multitude of conflicts throughout the world have been increasingly recognised (Bloom and Lokmanoglu, 2020; Darden et al., 2019; Gentry, 2019; Goldstein, 2003; Latif et al., 2020; Vogel et al., 2014). Although some scholars still argue that violence is quintessentially masculine, while peace is transcendentally feminine (Gilmartin, 2017) – a metaphysics according to which women who engage in violence become men (e.g. Avoine and Tillman, 2015) – the terms of the academic debate have shifted decisively.

However, outside academia, women engaged in organised violence are still treated, at best, as paradoxes (Tabak, 2011), curiosities (Martini, 2018) and deviants (Darden et al., 2019; Martini, 2018; Nacos, 2005) or, at worst, as unfeminine, mad, cruel and bloody (Gentry and Sjoberg, 2015). In the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, People’s Army [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, Ejército del Pueblo, FARC-EP], women played critical roles in combat and the organisations’ politics. Yet they have not escaped these stereotypes, despite countless testimonies of former farianas (FARC-EP women). Of Karina, for instance, former FARC-EP commander, all sorts of rumours abound: she is described as bloody and vicious, playing football with human heads and celebrating with music on the warm corpses of her victims (Hernández, 2008). According to her, ‘that myth was created because [. . .] I was a fighting woman who never flinched in the face of the enemy, and that is something that some cannot accept in this sexist society’ (¡Pacifista!, 2016).

The post-conflict environment brought the farianas into direct contact with stereotypes, restricting their space in shaping their post-demobilisation place in society. While the 2016 FARC-EP and Colombian government peace agreement included gender provisions, in practice, not much has been implemented and no clear mechanisms for post-demobilisation participation for women were developed (ARN, 2018; Gpaz, 2018). As such, despite claims of ‘women’s empowerment’ – an increasingly depoliticised notion (Cornwall and Rivas, 2015) – the reintegration of FARC-EP female combatants became tantamount to an exercise of assimilation into a patriarchal society. This process of reordering has served to discipline former combatants and their bodies according to prescribed gender roles.

Generally speaking, the potential contribution of excombatant women to peace and to a more equitable post-conflict society (Lyytikäinen et al., 2021) is routinely ignored. From the still dominant liberal peacebuilding paradigm, the ‘anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-misogynist’ content of some insurgencies (MacManus, 2015: 54) or the idea that there may be affirmative aspects in women’s experience as insurgents (Yadav, 2020) is often overlooked. Conflict and post-conflict scenarios, however, can create opportunities for women to change their society and their own roles within it (Arostegui, 2013). While peacebuilding efforts often aim to elicit a ‘return to normal’ or a ‘return from anarchy [sic] to domesticated order’ (Mackenzie, 2012: 1–2), they have the potential to instead transform social realities to overcome those causes which originated gendered violence in the first place. Addressing the structures of violence in order to bring about sustainable peace goes beyond the mere participation of women in peace processes and instead requires transformative change to advance women’s rights and gender equality, particularly through the sharing of alternative narratives of agency (Kouvo and Levine, 2008; Porter, 2003).

This article argues that women, including former combatants, have the potential to contribute to transformative peacebuilding, including by sharing their experiences of challenging traditional roles and expanding women’s participation in the political sphere (González-Pérez, 2006). The marginalisation of women combatants in the context of peace processes and post-conflict society, even when gender provisions are included, severely restricts the transformative potential of peacebuilding and contributes to the reordering of women in post-conflict society. We derive this argument from the experience of the FARC-EP women post-demobilisation in the context of a peace process that originally paid significant attention to gender. Building on Mackenzie’s (2012) concept of conjugal order, the article first discusses the concept of reordering of women post-conflict and posits exploratory hypotheses for conditions under which this reordering can take place (or not). We then discuss the Colombian context specifically, focusing on experiences of farianas in navigating the peace negotiations and the challenges experienced in the reintegration process. These include their difficulties to establish gender issues as a priority during the negotiations and the backlash against provision in the referendum to validate the agreement, the pressures to conform to gendered stereotypes in their daily lives, stereotyped media representations, and the challenges of transitional justice’s handling of the farianas. Based on our findings, we argue that, far from serving as a transformative space for women, the way in which the peace process has unfolded has created an unspoken red line which reinforces traditional gender roles and reorders these rebel women in line with the prevailing conjugal order. Finally, we discuss the transformative potential that remains despite these challenges.

Methodology

This article is backed by ethnographic research carried out in six case studies located in South-Western Colombia during 2014–2018 (Piñuña Blanco and Maravelez in Putumayo; La Marina in Tolima; San Isidro and Bolo Blanco in Cauca Valley; and Sinaí, Cauca). In these case studies, we conducted interviews with 20 women and organised focus group discussions in which 33 women participated. During the first phase of this research, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2017 with six female ex-combatants in two concentration points for demobilised guerrillas (El Oso, Tolima, and Carmelita, Putumayo).

In a second phase (2019–2020), five female ex-combatants living outside the concentration points were interviewed in-depth; two of them, Victoria Sandino and Tanja Nijmeijer, have a public profile and had participated in the peace negotiations. We also interviewed two women members of the Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition (hereafter Truth Commission), created as a transitional justice mechanism out of the 2016 peace agreement. To protect their identities, these interviews are anonymised. More interviews had been planned but the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted our plans; the current political crisis and the extreme lethal violence that former excombatants are facing makes it difficult to expand this research at present. However, the data collected so far allow us to identify through thematic analysis a number of problematic issues raised by the reintegration of women combatants in Colombia and problematising them in this article.

Women, peace and the reordering process

Academic perspectives on women in conflict have been increasingly questioning the reductionist victimhood narrative, focusing instead on the diverse roles assumed by women in such contexts (Eisenstein, 2007; Sjoberg, 2016; Syed and Ali, 2011), and the ways in which women’s experiences in insurgencies can be, in some cases, affirmative (Yadav, 2020). In the words of Hauge (2020),

Gender equality within armed groups has been [. . .] better than the general balance of gender roles in the countries in which these groups have been fighting. [. . . The] improved gender balance achieved within the armed groups during war could represent a potential asset for bringing about post-conflict changes in gender relations in that society [. . . The] particular moment of transition offers an invaluable opportunity for change – from something that has not worked to something better – is generally neglected. (pp. 220–221)

It has been noted, for instance, that in conflict there can be ‘often more “political space” for radical change in social relations, including those of gender’ (Pankhurst, 2003: 159), providing ‘opportunities to advance women’s rights as social, cultural and political structures across private and public spheres start to radically shift and men and women take on new roles and responsibilities’ (Green and Sweetman, 2013: 430). In these contexts, according to Chinkin and Charlesworth (2006), ‘women become interested in the goal of social transformation rather than restored dependence and subordination’ (p. 941). This shift in power dynamics can take place at multiple levels, and women’s contributions at smaller or more localised levels can also impact broader post-conflict systems (George, 2020).

Despite advances in the literature surrounding women in combat, however, the reality of the post-conflict experience often serves to reinforce rather than transform traditional gender roles. Mackenzie (2012) describes this phenomenon in her conceptualisation of conjugal order, which includes both ‘laws associated with marriage and the family, including marital, paternity, adoption, and inheritance laws’ and social norms (p. 4). This notion of conjugal order goes beyond analysis of sexuality by examining the ‘links between sexual regulation and broader notions of order and stability’ (Mackenzie, 2012). In examining postconflict disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) of female combatants in Sierra Leone, Mackenzie illustrates the ways in which ideas about conjugal order affect broader notions of peace and development. Ultimately, Mackenzie (2012) finds that postconflict policies ‘discipline individuals by sending explicit messages about “normal” and legitimate behaviours and roles’ while also constructing ‘acceptable and normalised gender subjects’ (p. 15). We expand on this idea by explaining how conjugal order achieves these outcomes; we argue that it is reordering processes themselves that shape, reinforce and perpetuate conjugal order in the postconflict sphere.

One form that this reinforcement of conjugal order may take is the reification of singular narratives of women in conflict as victims. Victimhood narratives are still prevalent among practitioners and in mainstream humanitarian discourses, taking subtle but pervasive forms. These include a reductive focus on – and even fetishisation of – sexual violence at the expense of all other issues affecting women (Autesserre, 2010; Eriksson-Baaz and Stern, 2013; Meger, 2016); the depoliticisation, infantilisation and ‘feminisation’ of victims’ categories such as refugees (Dogra, 2011); the grouping of women and children into a single category (Carpenter, 2005); the reification of violence as masculine (e.g. Avoine and Tillman, 2015); and the refusal to acknowledge women’s active agency in conflict (Gentry and Sjoberg, 2015).

These narratives go hand in hand with another narrative, according to which the ‘skills of women as mediators and decision-makers, and their experience in encouraging dialogue in their communities’, make them natural-born peace-makers (Moosa et al., 2013: 458). Undoubtedly, gendered roles impact the way in which women and men experience conflict and post-conflict (Lockett, 2008), but the ‘crude stereotypes which equate men with war and violence and women with peace’ (Green and Sweetman, 2013: 427) are unsustainable generalisations, presenting a one-dimensional view of their lives (Charlesworth, 2008; Dietrich, 2012; Goldstein, 2003; Hauge, 2020).

Inasmuch as women’s engagement in violence has been problematised (see, for example, Parashar, 2016), there are also controversies surrounding their roles in peacebuilding. Women’s participation in peace processes, which by and large remain largely dominated by men (Anderlini, 2007; Moosa et al., 2013), needs to be guaranteed on the grounds of equity with men. This guarantee must recognise that women too participate extensively in conflicts, but also should highlight social dynamics at the root of conflict-related violence. War-time atrocities against women – and men – are the extension and intensification of gendered violence prevalent in peace-time (Meger, 2016), or, indeed, of existing power imbalances across gender divides (El-Bushra, 2007). Likewise, post-conflict scenarios can often represent a continuation or even exacerbation of gendered forms of violence (Chinkin and Charlesworth, 2006; Mackenzie and Foster, 2017).

These forms of violence are not only physical, but structural and systemic. According to Dietrich, ‘insurgent gender regimes are temporary constructions, shaped in the exceptional context of armed struggle’, allowing ‘for the construction of militant femininities and masculinities and accommodation of gender relations’. However, in the post-conflict scenario, this gender regime is ‘dismantled’ and ‘the temporary construction of the female comrade fades away as an “exceptional transgression” amid systematic marginalization, discrimination, stigmatization and exclusion’, thus perpetuating patriarchy in the transition process (Dietrich, 2012: 503–504). This restoration of an idealised pre-war gendered order (Mackenzie and Foster, 2017), which for most women is often far from rosy, is what we call a reordering process. These reordering processes serve as mechanisms through which conjugal order is reified, thereby closing off possibilities for transformative change.

The post-conflict ‘backlash’ and the reordering process are not necessarily universal: based on Nepal, Yadav (2020) argues that war-time experiences impacted positively the position of women in post-conflict. We concur that reordering is not unavoidable in post-conflict scenarios. Evidence from the Colombian case suggests that two variables may influence the position of women in post-conflict. One is the nature of the rebel movement as such; in this case, with different emphases, both the FARC-EP and the Nepalese Maoists challenged traditional gendered roles. The other is the outcome of war: while in Nepal the monarchy was toppled and the Maoists emerged as relative victors, in the case of Colombia the system was untouched and the rebels emerged squarely defeated. The outcome explains why there has been relative empowerment in Nepal while in Colombia, the backlash led to reordering. While the reordering of farianas supports the saliency of these variables, future research could build on these case studies to examine these factors in a comparative context.

Our perspective on this question is informed by a transformative peacebuilding perspective, that is, a perspective which goes beyond the mere understanding of violence as physical or direct violence, incorporating the dimensions of structural violence (see Galtung, 1969) and systemic violence (see Žižek, 2008). From a transformative peacebuilding perspective, to build sustainable peace we need to address structural violence which is ingrained in social relations, power relations and in socio-economic institutions (Buckley, 2018). This approach coincides with the transformative justice critique within the field of transitional justice, emphasising structural changes to tackle systemic and structural violence (Hoddy and Gready, 2020; Lambourne, 2009; Robins and Gready, 2014). Gender relations are well entrenched in those structures of violence (Anglin, 1998), and the reordering process is precisely the process by which that structural and gendered violence becomes normative in the post-conflict scenario. Women combatants are critical to countering the reordering process because they represent a challenge to the traditional authority of state and family, and their reintegration in post-conflict reconstruction, as has been noted, ‘requires basic changes in society and politics’ (Boutron, 2015: 163).

FARC-EP women’s experiences

Colombia’s conflict can be traced back to the 1940s and is firmly anchored in agrarian strife; by and large this conflict has been fought in the countryside, with extensive regions being colonised by people who were displaced by organised violence elsewhere (Gutiérrez, 2015; LeGrand, 1988; Molano, 1987; Ramírez, 1990). Unlike other guerrillas that had important urban middle-class participation (e.g. Viterna, 2013), the bulk of the FARC-EP’s female combatants were drawn from this peasant constituency in conflict-affected colonisation regions.

Although the participation of women in the FARC-EP, particularly at command level, falls short of the experience of other insurgent groups (Alison, 2003, 2011; Boutron, 2013, 2015; Knapp et al., 2016; Szekely, 2020; White, 2015), it was still very significant. Among guerrilla ranks, 33% of combatants were women (UNAL, 2017). ¹ Although some accounts mention women constituted 40% of mid-level commanders (Gibbs, 2010), they were probably less. No woman ever made it to the Secretariat of the Central High Command, though the difficulty of women in reaching leadership positions is hardly unique to the FARC-EP. ² According to Miguel Pascuas,

At first, there were almost no women in the guerrillas, but [. . .] we started to have more discipline, internal regulations and rules to [. . .] make it easier for women to join the organisation and participate in politics. [. . .] Myriam Narváez ³ was the first female combatant in the FARC [. . .]. ⁴

Originally, there were women accompanying the guerrillas as mothers, wives and daughters, their roles resembling those ascribed to them in the peasant communities where they originated (Ferro and Uribe, 2002). But these roles, according to a veteran female FARC-EP member, evolved with the expansion of the insurgency:

Women started to join in significant numbers in the 1980s [. . .] [A]s they saw that the women were equal in the guerrilla, they started to join. In our regulations we gave a role to women fighters. But it was only in the 1990s that they started to become commanders. Before that, they were always subordinate. ⁵

Gutiérrez and Carranza (2017) concur that the expansion of the FARC-EP was behind the mass recruitment of women, but they emphasise that their ideology made it possible for women to enter on a more or less equal footing. According to the internal regulations of the FARC-EP from the 4th conference in 1970, women had the same rights as men and discrimination on the grounds of gender was strictly punished. Being a guerrilla is hard work: ‘you have to work like a man here, and that is exhausting, hard, difficult, but you toughen up’. ⁶ Both women and men faced the same burdens, something the female guerrillas found empowering but challenging:

We are equal, and we are constantly battling against remnants of sexism [machismo] we may encounter. [. . .] [O]ut there, women get their roles assigned to them [. . .]. Here the work load is shared in turns. Each comrade is responsible for washing his/her clothes. We went into combat, we gathered intelligence, we collected wood for the fire. Both men and women did work as nurses, in communications . . . it all depended on the individual capacities of a given person, not on their gender. ⁷

This description is consistent with previous studies on the lives of women guerrillas:

the organization allows females a relative autonomy and a control over their lives – including sexual freedom – unimaginable in the patriarchal rural societies from which the vast majority are recruited. Indeed, for many young females, the FARC offers a sanctuary from physical and verbal, occasionally sexual, abuse, empowers them through arms, assigns defined roles and tasks that allows them a measure of control over their lives. The contrast between the relative freedom and control over their choices in the FARC and the subordinate position held by women in Colombian society makes reintegration into civilian life especially difficult for former guerrilleras. (Herrera and Porch, 2008: 611)

One difficult decision for many women fighters was not to have children. Although they could be authorised at times to continue a pregnancy, they had to leave their children with relatives to resume their fighting activities as soon as possible (Ferro and Uribe, 2002). Contraception was compulsory and unauthorised pregnancies often ended in abortions.

Nonetheless, there was still sexism to be found in its ranks, because ‘machismo is everywhere’ (Gibbs, 2010: 80). Sexism, however, was punished, and women managed in a few units to create exclusive spaces for women; in the 21st Front, for instance, women met Tuesdays and Fridays between 1 and 3 pm to discuss their problems and contributions as women revolutionaries. ⁸ The changing role of women within the organisation proved the agency of these women, thereby challenging deep-seated traditional gender roles in morally conservative Colombia.

Life after war: problematic reintegration

The start of peace negotiations between the FARC-EP and the government in Havana in 2012 also marked the beginning of another process: the reordering of farianas and the subsequent reentrenchment of conjugal order in Colombian society. The following section draws on the experiences of former FARC-EP combatants to illustrate the ways in which this reordering took place, both during the creation and alteration of the peace agreement and in the reintegration processes.

Negotiating gendered priorities

There was a small number of fariana delegates during the negotiations. They felt that for the FARC-EP delegation gender issues were secondary: ‘I always fought for women, [. . .] but I never received feminist education’, says Victoria Sandino. ‘But when we started talking to women movements, with peasants, trade unions’ who came to Cuba to discuss peace, ‘we started to wonder how we were going to include the women’s demands in the final agreement’. ⁹ According to Nijmeijer, they had to do a ‘crash course on feminism for dummies’, while they discussed internally and started relations with international women’s organisations. ¹⁰ They started their own website for farianas and for ‘a lot of people . . . a separate website was divisionism, we had a huge row within the organisation’. ¹¹ After overcoming these suspicions, they gained a prominent role in the process. Despite this wealth of experience, however, media treatment of these women served to remind them of their ‘correct’ place in society moving back towards a strict reinforcement of conjugal order.

At the same time, the farianas faced government opposition to expanding civil society participation -including women- in the negotiations:

Women’s organisation demanded to be listened to during the negotiations, but the government insisted that the negotiations were between the government and the FARC [. . .] The government refused systematically to accept women, but we kept insisting. [. . .] We proposed a women’s conference and the government rejected it [. . .] eventually, we could only meet privately 15 women who came as tourists and that way we discussed their proposals. ¹²

A Gender Subcommittee in the negotiations was created in 2014 due to pressure on the Colombian government from women’s organisations, from the Cuban and Norwegian governments, and from the FARC-EP women negotiators. ¹³ According to Sandino, when the subcommittee on disarmament was created, there was a female lieutenant in the subcommittee. Unlike with the government women delegates, their relationship with her was more constructive and their joint pressure resulted in the Gender Subcommittee. They developed a gender framework which took into account demands of women, mostly on issues related to land and political participation; still, Sandino feels that there was a serious deficit on the demands of the LGTBI community. ¹⁴

Backlash through referendum

When the agreement was signed in 2016, former combatants had to reintegrate into a highly militaristic and patriarchal society (Rodríguez, 2018; Theidon, 2009), which poses a formidable challenge to sustainable peacebuilding (Meger and Sachseder, 2020), as evidenced with the mobilisation of the far-right and evangelical sects against what they called the ‘gender ideology’ contained in the peace agreement during the October 2016 peace referendum. According to Sandino,

Colombia is a very conservative society, and they used the gender framework to attack the peace process [. . .] mostly on issues concerning the LGTBI community. [. . .] They resorted to blatant lies [. . .] to manipulate people. The General Attorney [procurador] Ordoñez, [. . .] claimed [. . .] that [the peace agreement] was intending to turn our children into homosexuals. [. . .] These people opposed the peace agreement, but they had to get a hook that people would support, and in such a conservative society, the gender framework provided that hook. ¹⁵

In the wake of the defeat of the original agreement in the referendum, former president Uribe critiqued the agreement’s dismantling of the ‘biological difference between man and woman’ and instead advocated for the strengthening of ‘religious family values’ (Céspedez-Báez, 2016: 183). This momentum spurred changes to the agreement itself. While the changes were not extensive and most of the differential gendered practical measures across the various components of the agreement were kept, these changes significantly altered the treatment of gender at times. Provisions aimed at eliminating sexism, for instance, were replaced with wording centring around preventing discrimination; in addition, the revised version of the introduction ‘recognises [. . .] the family as the fundamental nucleus of society’ (Cancillería, 2016: 6). This revised final agreement demonstrates a clear reordering in line with the prevailing conjugal order in Colombian society. By removing mentions of gender-specific provisions and placing a renewed emphasis on the family as the cornerstone of society, the agreement dulled its transformative potential and instead served to contribute to the reordering of former female combatants.

From combatant to housewife

The contrast between the daily lives these women led in the guerrilla with their new civilian lives after demobilisation echoed this pattern of reordering. According to a demobilised woman, a ‘fariana leads a very different life to that of other women [. . .]. This is a very sexist culture [. . .] we are expected to be submissive to our men’. ¹⁶ Others highlight the difficulties they are experiencing to be reintegrated into a society which they failed to change: ‘I am personally finding it very difficult to adapt to this rotten society, full of anti-values [. . .] I am only thinking of my survival’. ¹⁷

They struggle with unemployment, economic hardship and insecurity: around 300 excombatants have been assassinated in absolute impunity, presumably by far-right death squads often operating with police and army collusion. Although ‘only three of those assassinated are women, insecurity is on the rise and many of the women who have become leaders in their regions, are being threatened’. ¹⁸ On top of all this hardship experienced differentially by women, is the pressure to conform to traditional gendered roles:

I feel that my comrades are eager to prove everybody that they can be ‘good women’, that they can perform traditional roles, and they go to great lengths to do what women should do, have children, do the cleaning, cook, be a good housewife. ¹⁹

According to this logic, dictated by the norms comprising conjugal order in Colombia, being ‘good’ necessitates conformity with the prevailing (traditional) gender roles.

This pattern extends to all corners of the former combatant sphere. One of the focal points for the reproduction of patriarchy is the family, a disciplining institution where they are expected to turn from ‘guerrillas’ into ‘proper’ women:

Unfortunately many women forgot where they came from and are now adopting traditional roles. And now you see your comrades washing the underwear of their man, while he is lying there watching television [. . .] We feel a lot of pressure from our families. My partner’s mother always chastises him for not looking like the boss at home, that he seems like my servant, and that is not so. ²⁰

It is not only the fariana who feels like a misfit, but also the fariano, the male excombatant who is regarded as unconventional: ‘my father and brother [. . .] thought he [i.e., her partner] was weird, because he seems very tough’ but he was changing nappies and sharing domestic responsibilities. ²¹ This pervasive pressure from families and the wider context has an effect on the relationships:

I think that with the peace process it was the women who lost the most. We went from our collective life [. . .], with a lot of solidarity, to be back into the private sphere, turning us into housewives. Even guerrilla men are starting to adopt patriarchal positions which they never had before. [. . .] This is the price of being back to this sexist society. In peacetime many couples have broken up because many guerrilla women are not putting up with this. My partner, for instance, was a guerrilla and now we are having problems because he is developing patriarchal attitudes. He now wants me to stay at home raising children. ²²

Some women originally joined the FARC-EP escaping from abusive families, and now, after conflict ‘they are returning to their families, and they are going through these traumas again’. ²³ The difficulty of many women reconnecting with their families has already been remarked elsewhere (Observatorio de Paz y Conflicto (OPyC), 2015: 64–68).

Media representations: commanders’ mistresses?

If women feel constantly judged in the private sphere, the public sphere has not been kinder. The experiences during the Havana negotiations was instructive of what they could expect on their return to ‘civilian life’. Media harassed and insulted the farianas and rarely conducted interviews with them, devastating their morale. ²⁴ The media particularly relished in attacking Tanja Nijmeijer, a foreigner in a peasant guerrilla, by fabricating salacious stories:

In Havana there were younger, less experienced negotiators than myself, yet nobody was as questioned as me. [. . .] I was accused of being there because I was the mistress of Márquez first, of Santrich later, and in the end, I was everybody’s mistress. [. . .] I received all the time messages saying that I was FARC’s prostitute. ²⁵

After reintegration, they complain about their media representations, feeling invisibilised. Whenever they get media attention, they are harassed and defamed, ‘they used the images of two comrades from Tolima saying they were raped, and these comrades are litigating because that was an utter lie’. ²⁶

Whose truth? Transitional Justice and the farianas

Among our interviewees, there was deep distrust for the transitional justice mechanisms:

Some people think it is an aberration that we are allowed to tell our part of the story, that we said that we lived a happy life while in the guerrillas . . . they think this is terrible, we should all be full of regrets, and confessing supposed crimes. ‘We are willing to forgive the rank and file of the FARC [. . .] if they admit they were wrong and conform to God’s way’. I feel this discourse is very powerful in the Special Jurisdiction for Peace and in the Truth Commission, and every time they say something of the government or the right-wing paramilitaries, then they have to equate it to something the FARC did. ²⁷

The limitations on women’s participation in transitional justice mechanisms conforms to dominant narratives of women’s experience in insurgency reduced to forced abortions and contraceptives. The decontextualised discussion creates false equivalences between the FARC-EP, in which sexual violence was rare and strictly punished, with state security forces or their proxies, which strategically used sexual violence regularly (Davies and True, 2015). This discussion also serves to reinforce a schism between the rebels and a deeply conservative society who is horrified at contraception and abortion per se. Their only possible redemption is to confess that they were forced to do so by evil men who betrayed their childlike innocence. This link was indeed made by one of our interviewees:

on the issue of abortions, it is such a scandal made even by some people who call themselves feminists but who are really more moralistic than the Centro Democrático [i.e, conservative party in power] [. . .] Maternity is not a role you can assume amidst a war! Women could ask, and sometimes they got permission, to leave temporarily or permanently to have babies. ²⁸

Precarious life existence, an extremely conservative society, unfulfilled government’s commitments, and the sense of loss of their collective life, of their political identity, loss of the measure of equality they had achieved, loom large in the new lives of these women. They feel pressured to conform to what the patriarchal society expects from them as women, while their voices are ignored and dismissed, because ‘a woman who took up arms is unforgivable to the eyes of God’. ²⁹ Ultimately, the farianas’ experiences of navigating post-conflict negotiation and reintegration tell a story of strict reordering along patriarchal lines.

The unspoken red-line: women, peace and reintegration

These testimonies reveal a great deal of frustration on the part of former FARC-EP women, who contrast the role they had in the insurgency with those ascribed to them in the society reintegrating them. In many post-peace agreement settings, and certainly in Colombia, the restored ‘normality’ is unequivocally patriarchal.

Experiences of marginalisation of demobilised women in post-conflict scenarios are certainly not a Colombian particularity; whether in Palestine, Nepal or Sri Lanka, there are similar experiences of women being pathologised, shamed and forced back to traditional roles with which they no longer identify (Azmi, 2015; Bloom and Lokmanoglu, 2020; Chinkin and Charlesworth, 2006; Gentry and Sjoberg, 2015; Hauge, 2020). However, as stated before, factors such as the nature of the rebel movement and the outcome of the conflict may affect how and to what extent reordering takes place. While the FARC-EP lacked a consistent gender framework or explicitly feminist outlook, it challenged nonetheless traditional gendered norms for women in a remarkably patriarchal society. On the second variable, there was a double defeat for the FARC-EP in general and for the women in the movement in particular. This defeat took place in two ways: first, through the inability to transforming the structures of violence (and patriarchy) in society through their rebellion; and second, through the peace agreement’s implementation of the gender dimension being limited in scope to little more than productive projects targeting women.

Meger and Sachseder (2020) demonstrate how neoliberalism, patriarchy and militarisation reinforce one another in Colombia, perpetuating structural and physical violence. However, the government was adamant that the political and economic models represented red-lines to be negotiated under no circumstances (El Espectador, 2015; El Nuevo Siglo, 2016). Besides those two explicit red-lines, there was an unspoken red-line: patriarchy was not to be questioned.

The unspoken red-line, the gendered order, became too evident from the moment negotiations started in the way insurgent women were portrayed and systematically pushed to the margins. It is not a coincidence that coverage of women combatants in the media during the negotiations centred on the baby boom in the concentration points, not on their political proposals (e.g. Clarín, 2017). This portrayal was the continuation of governmental demobilisation campaigns, one of which was designed to look like a lipstick ad, reading: ‘Guerrillera, feel like a woman again. Demobilize’ (Alpert, 2016). The exceptional circumstance posed by two foreign governments involved in the peace process (Norway and Cuba) who pressured the Colombian government, plus grassroots pressure from women’s organisations and the FARC-EP’s women, resulted in an unprecedented space for women during the negotiations – despite the changes introduced post-referendum. Nevertheless, as the agreement progressed to the implementation stage, the gendered order reasserted itself in sharp contrast to the Final Agreement’s references to a ‘gender-based approach’.

Demobilised women have the onus probandi squarely upon their shoulders to prove that they are deserving members of the patriarchal society into which they are reintegrating. They are expected to perform the rituals of femininity in ways even more exaggerated than women who never deviated, while the political party which was to sustain the (revolutionary) political project has quickly accommodated to the establishment they fought for half a century, in the name of reconciliation (Gutiérrez, 2020). The only quasi-political roles envisioned for these women, according to two interviewees of the Truth Commission, are to demobilise, to ‘denounce’ their experiences within guerrilla ranks, and to work in productive projects. ³⁰

These projects – to assist their reintegration – relate to the neoliberal component of the peace process by which excombatants are converted into cheap labour for export-oriented agribusiness; in this individual survival strategy, the intensive exploitation of ‘women in low-income households’ serves ‘as a buffer against the ravages of economic reforms’ (Wilson, 2011: 318). This model has been explicitly endorsed in the first chapter of the 2016 peace agreement, which promotes horizontal and vertical productive chains of rural small-scale production with ‘other modes of production’ (Cancillería, 2016: 12), in order to guarantee competitive production inserted in ‘value added chains’ (Cancillería, 2016: 33). Thus, women’s empowerment becomes ‘invest in women’, reducing empowerment to their participation in the neoliberal free-market without any discussion of the nature of this market on how to transform it in order to fit their needs (Cornwall and Rivas, 2015; Dogra, 2011; Hickel, 2014; Wilson, 2011).

The victims/perpetrators narrative shifts attention from transformation to reconciliation, replacing political claims with a therapeutical narrative of healing (Renner, 2015) that ultimately leaves the status quo untouched. Contrary to this view, Victoria Sandino emphasised they ‘were not victims nor victimisers’, but ‘had a political, a revolutionary role’. ³¹ Hauge (2020) suggests that, while

members of an armed group are rarely viewed as an asset [. . .] they may represent a strong and positive asset for change. This is the case not least with regard to the potential for change in gender relations in very traditional societies with strong macho cultures. (p. 222)

Sustainable peacebuilding in Colombia requires addressing structural issues behind conflict at both a political and economic level, together with a gender regime shaped by decades of militarism and centuries of patriarchy. The voices of these women can contribute much in this sense – including the potential incorporation into mainstream society of the new gender roles and ideas of equality that characterised their time in the FARC-EP.

Conclusion: more than talking the talk

Despite growing recognition of the contribution that women can play in peacebuilding, one particular category of women are systematically excluded: former rebel combatants. Women are accepted as mothers, victims, liberal scholars, NGO professionals, but most certainly not as rebels. Instead, they are portrayed as anomalies, their roles in conflict invisibilised or sensationalised, and their specific contributions to peacebuilding utterly dismissed.

The Colombian peace process resulted from the inability of revolutionaries to revolutionise society, and therefore, it implied their accommodation to the very society they wanted to change. The Colombian state, given the proliferation of NGOs and the close scrutiny to which it is subject because of its poor human rights records, has learned to talk the talk the international community wants to hear. This has produced many paradoxes between rhetoric and practice, such as human rights instructions given to the army (and by extension, to their paramilitary auxiliaries) on how to keep carrying carnage as usual without stirring international uproar – for example, killing people one by one over a period of many days, to avoid their violent acts being labelled a massacre (Tate, 2007; Theidon, 2009).

We identify a similar paradox with gender talk. The Colombian government conformed to what was expected by the international community: it produced, although reluctantly and only due to enormous pressure, a gender framework; it incorporated women to the negotiating table; accepted FARC-EP women as negotiators. However, as soon as the agreement was signed, the unspoken gendered red-line was quickly restored, and the far-right mobilised to oppose ‘gender ideology’. Concurrently, ex-combatants were expected back in their proper place as subordinate women, their roles limited to hand over weapons, become housewives, perform cheap labour, and – hopefully – denounce stridently the ‘excesses’ of revolutionary struggle. Their ideas and practices challenging the system were unacceptable.

Women’s proactive participation in peacebuilding – including excombatants – should be guaranteed as a matter of principle, on the grounds of equality, and on ethical grounds – women in specific contexts are affected differentially to men. Women’s participation alone does not guarantee empowering results; not all women are the same, and talk of gender is no substitute for political engagement. Sustainable peace requires a transformative approach to address those daily gendered violences, drawing ‘attention to the material basis of gender based violence from war to peace [. . .] and of persistent gender-based violence against both men and women’ (Kostovicova et al., 2020: 265–266). This requires a deep transformation of gendered economic and political structures. Naturally, the patriarchal family cannot be changed by decree. This is why the challenge to traditional gender roles requires a political space for these women and men who experienced different forms of relationship, which, although not completely egalitarian, were far more progressive than Colombia’s patriarchal order.

By discussing challenges for women’s reintegration in Colombia, we have aimed at contributing to transformative approaches to peacebuilding. However, further in-depth research on topics raised in this exploratory research is required: the evolution of masculinities in post-conflict, differences between insurgent women and how they affected perceptions of their experience (e.g. rural/urban, class differences), experience of sexualities within insurgent ranks (including the situation of LGTBIs within ranks), the impact on the post-conflict situation of women of the nature and outcomes of war, institutional responses and the women in the government side, among others. In order to test our suggested variables explaining the post-conflict reordering, comparative work will also be necessary. Nonetheless, by engaging with the voices of demobilised farianas, we have contributed a first step in that direction.