Guardians and Protectors: The Volunteer Women of the Donbas Conflict

Abstract

How does war reconfigure women’s social roles and status? This article investigates how women’s volunteering during conflict can challenge gendered divisions within society and transform the binary of masculine protector and feminine protected. When the Donbas conflict erupted in Ukraine in 2014, women assumed central roles as civilian volunteers who aided populations affected by violence. They gained a high level of social status in the context of a weak state, distrusted by its populace. Based on ten months of fieldwork and eighty-two interviews with civilian volunteers, this article argues that volunteering became a space of gendered negotiations over women’s position alongside wartime binaries of home/front and protector/protected. Ultimately, certain types of wartime volunteering created more opportunities for blurring these gendered divisions, enabling volunteer women to be framed as protectors of both soldiers and civilians. Moreover, age intersected with gender, as volunteer women’s life stage influenced their ability to become leaders within volunteer groups and their bodies were interpreted alongside gender roles within the family.