Conflict-Related Coercive Control: A Framework for Understanding Women's Experiences of Group-Based Coercive Control in Conflict-Affected Settings

Abstract

This paper presents a new “Framework of Paramilitary-related Coercive Control.” Based on empirical research in Northern Ireland, the paper evidences how coercive control can be used as an analytical lens to approach understanding of armed-actor-related intimate-partner violence, as well as being a form of conflict-related harm. The paper advances the concept of “conflict-related coercive control,” showing how the predatory nature of armed group social control is the basis for the endemic gendered control of women. It expands the study of intimate partner-based coercive control towards group-based control of women, and by so doing, expands the concept of social control, evidencing the gendered nature of armed group governance.

Introduction

Feminist scholarship has made significant inroads in making visible women's experiences of armed conflict violence and evidencing their basis in a “context, history and subjectivity” grounded in gender relations (Boesten, 2017, p. 509). Due to a narrowing focus on conflict-related sexualized violence (CRSV) in global scholarly, legal and political debates, the gendered analysis of women's experiences as a key basis for knowledge production is however estimated to have become de-centered (Davies & True, 2015). Further, the sustained reliance on bifurcated ideas of conflict/non-conflict violence that underpin methodologies across many disciplines is critiqued for missing the gendered relational nature of harm from conflict to peace, as well as within and across different types and drivers of violence (Alexandre & Mutondo, 2022; True & Tanyag, 2019; Yadav & Horn, 2021).

Feminists argue the need to sustain and further develop gender analysis and to employ diverse epistemologies and methodologies that expand rather than corral the boundaries of conflict-associated violence (Davies & True, 2015; Lugones, 2020). This includes, for example, moves to theorize and evidence the linkages between intimate partner violence (IPV) and the “political violence” of armed conflict, relegated as a “private” harm and erroneously de-coupled from armed violence (Gray, 2019; Swaine, 2015). Examination of less visceral harms and those less reliant on or aligned with militarized definitions of conflict/non-conflict for their legitimacy are argued for (Boesten, 2017; Yadav & Horn, 2021). So too is the need to make visible how everyday invisibilized threat and fear constitute women's lives from micro to macro levels, including within and across global conflict settings (True & Tanyag, 2019; Turner & Swaine, 2023). There is a need to look beyond prescriptive and assumptive frames of violence towards identifying the normative and everyday in what makes harm strategic, organized and constituent of conflict. While there is a sustained need for continued expansion of CRSV, the rendering of what constitutes “conflict-related,” and particularly, of harms that constitute conflict-related violence against women (CRVAW), requires sustained feminist inquiry and expansion.

From here, this article uses the term CRVAW to reflect and respond to the above debates. I further develop my previous articulation of this term and its intention “to allow for the broadest capture of all forms of violence, including CRSV, that women may identify and that have a link to an armed conflict” (Swaine, 2018, pp. 12–13) through this paper. The term is an attempt to give recognition to how “the catalogue of gendered violence is still being compiled” (Swaine, 2018, p. 3) and that there remains a need to make visible the range of harms that manifest as a result of contextual nuances in periods of time and space categorized as conflict, post-conflict and peacebuilding. It is used to denote a range of both established legal categories of violence against women in conflict, such as strategic rape, sexual slavery, and forced marriage (as adjudicated legal categories of crime), as well as broader harms that are conflict-related, meaning that they are directly or indirectly related to the dynamics and tactics of political violence, its actors and entities, including political, economic and societal harms normative to women's lives and that become exploited and mutate in response to conflict and its protagonists. In this term, there lies space for the violence that arises in the “in-between” (Swaine, 2018). By this I mean harm not captured in either the bifurcated political and legal parameters that determine in-conflict violence, or, harms or aspects of harm not realized in categories of non-conflict/private violence, and therefore, in a comparative stacking, not considered elemental to in-conflict violence. In the in-between, or the space past current frames, exist harms that are “misrecognised or remain unseeable” as they “perfectly coincide” (Shabot, 2021, pp. 444, 447) with the everdayness of expected normative gendered harm (Urban-Walker, 2009). Ultimately, the aim of the development of CRVAW and its use in this paper is not to make harms visible so that they can conform to pre-determined in-conflict or conflict-related frames. Rather, it is to show how epistemically disappeared harms may be elemental to opening up our understanding of everyday experience as harm, which in turn, may be fundamental to and underpin what is determined as conflict-related about them.

Accordingly, this article attempts a step towards further expansion of knowledge on CRVAW by presenting a new conceptualization of coercive control related to armed conflict. To date primarily studied as a central element of IPV (outside of conflict settings), coercive control is theorized as a strategy of cumulative abusive and freedom-denying behaviors that aim to secure dominance and control by one partner over another. The slow build-up towards demands, threat and compliance come with or without accompanying acts of violence (Dutton & Goodman, 2005; Stark, 2007).

Coercive control been used as a concept by scholars examining IPV outside of conflict settings as a means to rupture assumptions that conflated IPV with physical and/or sexualized acts of violence (Stark, 2007). Accordingly, it has the potential to contribute to inverting prevailing assumptions in global scholarship and politics that when it comes to warfare, the gendered violence of concern are discrete and episodic acts of violence. Understood and experienced as a diffuse dynamic, coercive control presents itself as a slippery concept, one that is hugely challenging to empirically examine. It has however significant potential to open-up aspects of conflict-related experience with starting points beyond assumptions that conflate conflict violence with overt acts of visible organized strategic physical and sexualized violence.

This paper contends that the concept of conflict-related coercive control has significant potential as first, an analytical and heuristic device lens for understanding women's experiences of conflict and conflict-related harm; second, as a methodological starting point for approaching the study of conflict “violence”; and third, as a form of conflict harm that is potentially omnipotent as a central organizing element of women's gendered conflict experience. Applying the concept of coercive control outside of the context of IPV and instead to conflict-affected settings however, requires adapting it to the specificity of those settings. A focus on conflict-related coercive control on its own terms that is as a less tangible harm understood from the perspective of women's experiences will, it is argued, enlighten multiple fields towards whole other worlds of conflict dynamics and related harm.

This article is based on empirical research undertaken in post-agreement Northern Ireland from 2020–2023. The research focused on individual women's, community organisations’ and security and policy actors’ experiences of contemporary paramilitarism in that setting. Interview data is used to evidence the relation between social control by paramilitary groups at community levels and control of women in intimate relationships, empirically and theoretically advancing the concept of conflict-related coercive control. To achieve that concept, the paper establishes a new “Framework of Paramilitary-related Coercive Control.” The paper expands the study of the concept of coercive control in IPV by evidencing group-based coercive control. It also expands the study of CRVAW by evidencing coercive control as an element of conflict-related harm. The article illustrates that the coercive control of women in their intimate relationships by men who are members of/or who feign membership of armed groups, can form part of the broader collective social control of communities by those groups. It thereby shows how apparently “individual” (assumptively private) abusive relationships form part not just of effective operating mechanisms for armed groups, but are wholly constituent of their enactment of conflict violence. The paper thereby also extends armed group social control as a gendered phenomenon requiring gendered analysis if it is to be fully understood. From here, the paper establishes a rationale for adapting coercive control to conflict and post-conflict settings and provides an overview of Northern Ireland as the empirical research site. It then presents a new “Framework of Paramilitary-related Coercive Control,” followed by a discussion of implications for the study of this phenomenon and a summary conclusion.

Gender, Coercive Control and Conflict-Related Violence

Feminist Approaches to Gender, Violence, and Conflict

Feminist scholars convincingly argue that structural, habitual, and everyday violence is the starting point for understanding warfare, rather than warfare representing a break to more peaceful (read: non-violent) times (Innes & Steele, 2018). Relatedly, it is argued that CRVAW cannot be understood during war “without first examining its cultural meanings in peace” (Olujic, 1998, p. 31). The connected nature of war-time and everyday gendered violence is offered as a more comprehensive understanding of harm across time and space (war and peace) and between forms of violence (e.g., between IPV and armed actor-driven CRSV) (Yadav & Horn, 2021).

That body of scholarship is challenged by and is challenging the rendering of “scope” in articulation of conflict violence. What becomes “conflict-related” often rests on pre-determined regimes, such as criminal definitions that many gendered harms fall outside of (Swaine, 2015; Turner & Swaine, 2023). Whether violence is deemed “worthy” of being a dimension of “political” violence is central to the debate, a worthiness routinely relying on, ostensibly, the degree to which violence is related- or not related- to state/non-state actors or contestation over state power (Innes & Steele, 2018, p. 154).

Scholars have also shown that the “abstraction” of gendered violence from war-violence reinforces the idea that it cannot be conflict-related (Gray, 2019, p. 190). For example, forms of harm like IPV have, problematically, become framed as influenced by, part of and related to the war, “but ultimately separate from,” “war”—the “not-war” (Gray, 2019, p. 190). Recognition that “violence is not confined to exceptional events” and that everyday violence is “the majority violence in the world” (Innes & Steele, 2018, pp. 151–152) instead shifts our understanding. “Locating violence in the midst of daily life demands a focus on the mundane, the ordinary rather than the extraordinary” (Dobash & Dobash, 1998, p. 142). It pushes our understanding towards how “attending to everyday life allows for the decentered individual to be embedded in their circumstances and relationships” and for recognition that “unexceptional, habitual, and everyday violence forms part of international politics and, in particular, part of international security” (Innes & Steele, 2018, pp. 152–153). Accordingly, if everyday violence was to have “relevance in international politics not only when it occurs as an offshoot of war and conflict, but as it is experienced in everyday life” (Innes & Steele, 2018, p. 153), then the everyday becomes the basis for how we conceptualize and see and not see conflict violence. It prompts us to reconsider “how war is (also) enacted within ‘private’ spaces and through ‘private’ experiences within warzones—how the ‘private’ is, itself, a space in which war (also) takes place” (Gray, 2019, p. 190). The distinction between “extraordinary” (i.e., conflict) and “ordinary” (i.e., IPV) forms of gendered violence, long problematized by feminist scholars (Gray, 2019; Swaine, 2018), becomes blurred. It points to the ways that “in war, ‘normal’ life and the ‘extraordinary’ which is part of normalization and dramatization exist simultaneously … [and that] in order to fight a war, it is necessary to preserve the structure of everyday life to a certain degree” (von Trotha, 1999, p. 39). Not only may IPV not be separate from war, but situating people and events into their contextual circumstances and relationships is ultimately what shows us how the mundane and everyday structures of harm are foundational to war.

It is important to acknowledge the growing and important body of scholarship that evidences IPV prevalence in conflict settings and the interlinkages between IPV and conflict (e.g., see: Ekhator-Mobayode et al., 2020; Gray & Dolan, 2022; Kelly et al., 2021; Restrepo et al., 2024). These approaches are signifcant and deepen understanding and a premise for the argument that the “ordinary” violence that characterizes women's lives is not just a site of political feminist struggle outside of conflict, but also within it. There is need to push past a reliance on “interlinkages” however to deepen evidence and argument, methodologically and conceptually, that violence by men known to women is a constituent part of their lives not just outside of war, but within it. We come to see that the tired reliance on making visible, explaining, and codifying CRVAW as that which is perpetrated by men from the enemy or opposing sides in war is no longer the sole crux upon which we can legitimize conflict violence (Gray, 2019; Gray & Dolan 2022; Swaine, 2018). Violence on women by men known to them in the context of warring and its aftermath instead comes to constitute and is CRVAW. While this article goes on to discuss coercive control as it manifests in women's experiences of IPV, it is less interested in explaining what IPV looks like in conflict-affected settings than attempting to nudge forward thinking on whether and how coercive control might be considered a constituent part of armed group violence and therefore an aspect of everyday organized conflict-related harm.

Social Control and Northern Ireland

In many conflict settings, non-state armed groups establish authority by creating institutions, providing goods and services, imposing a system of social order and through a combination of coercion and consent, sustain a system of “armed group governance” or social control over a territory and population (Arjona, 2009, 2014; Rickard & Bakke, 2021). In some conflict and post-conflict settings “[a]rmed actors control populations both by coercing and governing them” (Rickard & Bakke, 2021, p. 605). Gender analysis in the armed group social control literatures is a significant gap, particularly in relation to women's experiences of the governance and controlling strategies of such groups. The relationship between community-level social control by these groups and the intimate control of women requires further exploration, particularly in the potential that recognition of coercive control occurring under such conditions would blur, or even contest, all that makes it an everyday non-conflict violence.

Northern Ireland is an exemplary case in this regard. Fourteen “proscribed organizations” or paramilitary groups remain listed under the Terrorism Act (2000), with the terrorist threat level of those groups estimated at the time of writing as “substantial” (MI5, 2024). Stemming from “Loyalist” and “Republican” paramilitarism during the Northern Ireland Troubles, ¹ there now exists “a complex landscape” that includes: non-state paramilitary groups, and their members that adhere to long-held ethno-nationalist aspirations (i.e., “terrorist” or armed group ideologies); groups and/or individuals that use paramilitary identities for political-criminal-economic advantage; and individuals, who are members or feign membership solely for individual advantage (Gray et al., 2023; IRC, 2023, p. 13). This paper uses the term “paramilitarisms” to denote this broad and complex landscape. An Independent Reporting Commission (IRC) was established under the 2015 “Fresh Start” agreement to monitor the status of paramilitarism (Northern Ireland Executive et al., 2015). While Northern Ireland is “post-agreement” and the peace process largely viewed as successful, it is also the case that “the continued existence of paramilitarism in Northern Ireland constitutes a ‘clear and present danger’ for communities where paramilitary groups operate and, indeed, for the whole region” (NIAC, 2024, p. 5 citing IRC, 2022).

As macro political violence has decreased, paramilitary control and harm, limited to communities or towns considered sectarian enclaves, is estimated to be sustained and includes: so-called “punishment” attacks and shootings; murder; forced drug dealing and debt controls; commercial exploitation and extortion; loan sharking; protection rackets; forced prostitution; human trafficking; forced recruitment; and sexual exploitation and abuse (McAlister et al., 2021; Montgomery-Devlin, 2020; NIAC, 2024; Ritchie & McGreevy, 2019). Collectively these signal an organized and controlling force at community levels, as well as a context ripe for examining whether and how the coercive and predatory nature of armed group social control intersects with that of the gendered coercion and control of women.

For many policy actors in Northern Ireland, “coercive control” has become the preferred term to describe the “underappreciated dimension” (IRC, 2023, pp. 42–43) of how paramilitarisms use legitimacy generated during the conflict to now predatorily exploit and enact harm on their own communities (Sturgeon et al., 2024). Significant research in Northern Ireland during the Troubles evidenced the relationships between women's experiences of IPV and the conflict, including the use of guns in IPV and the inability of women to call police into locales controlled by paramilitary organizations (McKiernan & McWilliams, 1996). Building on that work, a 2016 study showed the decreased but sustained connections between paramilitarism and women's experiences of IPV, identifying how paramilitarism is used as a coercive tactic by perpetrators to coercively control women (Doyle & McWilliams, 2020; McWilliams & Doyle, 2017). Women's organizations in the region increasingly document the ways that women are subject to violence and abuse related to paramilitarisms in their communities, including their sexual and financial exploitation by these groups (e.g., see: WPG, 2022). Building on this understanding, this paper specifically examines how the intimate control of women relies on or is a facet of community-level paramilitary social control, lifting analysis of coercive control out of being perceived as solely a discrete form of IPV in conflict settings, towards making visible coercive control as the strategy through which they exert political, economic, and social control.

Adapting Coercive Control to Armed Groups

Coercive control was originally developed to describe sustained patterns of insidious harms and behaviors within an intimate relationship that build slowly towards the full coercion and control of a woman's personhood, life and habits (Stark, 2007). It aimed to capture the chronic rather than episodic nature of strategies such as intimidation, isolation, and humiliation that are themselves forms of harm (Stark, 2007). It was shown to rely on often imperceptible tactics that create a chronic environment of fear, dependence, and shame. It may be coupled with threat and/or physical and sexualized violence which are used to compel compliance with demands, creating the basis for control and dominance (Dutton & Goodman, 2005; Stark, 2007).

Given its complexity, simply transposing the term coercive control beyond its decades-long crafting relative to IPV affecting women, and instead onto non-state actor communitarian authority and control may be insufficient or indeed present risks, such as diluting the genesis and significance of the evolution of the term in relation to domestic abuse. In recognition of that risk, a broader frame, “coercive power” was used as a starting point for analysis in this paper. The concept of “coercive power,” developed by Mary Ann Dutton and Lisa Goodman, explains the “potential influence” that one person (“agent”) may have to impose their will on another (“the target”) in the context of IPV (Dutton & Goodman, 2005). Their “coercive power model” first establishes that contextual factors, economic, cultural and familial, underpins the power of a coercer. On that basis, the model next sets out how a coercer establishes power over and then control of the target, which involves: setting the stage for coercion, including creating a sense of obligation (e.g., emotional blackmail or excessive gifting so the target “owes” the coercer) and evidencing the coercer's potential for future harm; exploiting the target's vulnerabilities; and then using coercive tactics like threat, intimidation, fear, enactment of violence, as well as surveillance, to secure demands and control. The social factors combined with the steps taken by the coercer, show that coercive power-over is a process through which one person imposes on another, things, acts or behaviors that they do not want, or curtails or restricts things that they do want. The efficacy of stage-setting, demand and surveillance relies on an “or else” manipulative ploy, i.e., these tactics exploit a belief on the part of the target, that there will be a negative outcome if they do not comply favorably with a demand (the “choice” they make i.e., it is their fault if there is a negative outcome when they do not comply) (Dutton & Goodman, 2005; Stark, 2007). It simultaneously relies on the idea of a “reward power,” that is, if a target complies with a demand, then a “reward” is granted (e.g., the threatened harm is removed, or benefits are reinstated, such as access to finances or children). Coercive power establishes the perception on the part of the target that they are living in an omnipotent system of control, prompting regulation of their behavior to manage and mitigate further threat and consequence.

That model of coercive power is adapted in this paper to armed group social control (in the next section). The process of adaptation aims to broaden the lens of coercive control to capture and make space for recognition of the concept of conflict-related coercive control. In this case, the concept is advanced through empirical evidence of women's experiences of contemporary paramilitarisms in their communities. Thus, the resulting framework focuses on paramilitary-related coercive control. The framework is an attempt to respond to the significant gap in understanding of the gendered nature of armed group social control and particularly, of how the coercive control of women may be constituent to armed group social control.

Framework of Paramilitary-Related Coercive Control

A Framework of Paramilitary-related Coercive Control is presented. The framework draws from thirty-two qualitative semi-structured interviews conducted by the author in conjunction with Foyle Family Justice Centre in Derry/Londonderry, ² Northern Ireland, between 2021 and 2023. Interviews were conducted on a purposive sampling basis. Women, whose experiences of harm involved some aspect of paramilitarisms were identified through response services. Political, community, and service workers were identified through their roles and related exposure to paramilitarisms in their work. ³

The Framework of Paramilitary-related Coercive Control is illustrated in Figure 1. It maps women's experiences of dynamics of coercive control in their relationships and how they are related to paramilitary-related social control. By doing so, it evidences the layers of paramilitary control from intimate to community levels and how these are co-constituent and in many cases, indivisible. Direct quotes from interviews are used as the basis for the phases in the framework and are anonymously cited (their citation follows the coding convention used for the interviews). ⁴ The framework (Figure 1) consists of two components. The first component is the “onion” figure used to depict the Socio-Ecological Coercive Context, which is the background in which paramilitary-related coercive control is enabled. That is discussed first. The second component is the broader model that depicts the “steps” or phases that show how coercive power operates to enable paramilitary-related control of women (the series of boxes). Each box depicts a step/phase in the process of social-to-coercive control. The top level of each box captures the group-basis of social control, that is, aspects of paramilitarisms at wider community levels. The bottom-level box captures the individual-basis of coercive control, which is the coercive control in the intimate relationship by a woman's partner over her. Both boxes are connected showing the inter-relation and reliance between them. In the ‘response’ phase of the model, a third layer is added ‘Response: Services’ which depicts the ways that the social-individual coercive control dynamic affects service provision. Both the first (socioecological) and second components (series of boxes) of the framework are inter-related and rely on and reinforce each other, creating an environment that enables the gendered social and coercive control of women.

Figure 1.

Framework of paramilitary-related coercive control.

Socio-Ecological Coercive Context

Many inter-related contextual factors underpin how paramilitary-related coercion generates control. Three factors are selected here as being particularly relevant for control over women. The first is the structural gender inequalities and everyday gendered harms that establish an overarching social condition in which men's violence towards women is normative (Urban Walker, 2009). Gendered coercion exploits gendered norms of (in this case western) heterosexual dating and relationship interaction. For example, the use of complements, buying of clothes as gifts and knowing where a partner is, are all instantly recognizable patterns that form the “normative script for heterosexual courtship,” as well as, simultaneously, used in stage-setting tactics that are then used to undermine confidence, exploit insecurities and dominate women's self-hood (Anderson, 2009, p. 1448). Coercive control is not just a harm that is “invisible in plain sight” (Stark, 2007, p. 14), but a gendered dynamic that exploits historic heterosexist inequalities and unequal sexual freedoms and rights and that in turn, give meaning to harm for women. For example, when men “simply” threaten or issue a warning of some kind (e.g., through a loaded look), such moves are effective because the threat is understood by women as real.

Second is the socio-political context and histories of paramilitary conventions. During the conflict, paramilitaries evolved rituals of violence and control over communities such as punishment beatings and expulsions that have, over time, become the expected and normative ways of “doing paramilitarisms.” These paramilitary conventions, that is, patterns of behaviors, roles (e.g., protective of community and/or drug dealing), disciplinary measures, rituals, and lore have come to constitute the social context and customary habits that communities have come to know, envisage, and expect of paramilitarism. It is paramilitary convention, understood by paramilitaries themselves as the basis of the contingent-threat of their coercive power, and by women and communities as reprisals for non-compliance with their authority, that enables paramilitarism as convention to be effective. As feminist scholarship globally has shown, the socio-political context of conflict in this level arises within and from the outer layer of wider macro social context of gender inequalities.

The third factor is the historic silencing of Troubles-related gendered violence and its exclusion from processes for “dealing with the past.” As noted, the conflict influenced patterns of IPV (McKiernan & McWilliams, 1996); CRVAW was used in arrest, detention, and imprisonment by state actors (O’Keefe, 2017) and in paramilitary individual and collective violence, including sexualized assault, murder, and control of women's sexualities (Swaine, 2023). The latter patterns of paramilitary gendered violence have not been disrupted by either formal recognition that they took place, nor accountability processes that inhibit them (O’Rourke & Swaine, 2017). Intersecting dynamics of historical-to-contemporary paramilitary conventions and patterns of gendered violence are contextual to coercion and abuse today.

Paramilitary-related Coercive Control

Each of the key “steps” or phases that build towards paramilitary-related gendered coercive control of women is discussed next. The phases depicted are not necessarily experienced in a linear or uni-directional way by victims-survivors and are inter-relational and may be cyclical

Stage-Setting: Group-Based and Individual Paramilitary Convention

“Stage-setting” is the initial phase of coercive control whereby the coercer makes it clear to the target that the conditions, and/or the means are in place, to make a threat a reality. It may involve creating the expectancy of future harm (the “or else” ploy) and/or creating dependencies (Dutton & Goodman, 2005). Tactics vary, but establish a convincing basis for demand and control. For example, as explained by a service sector professional, paramilitary-related stage-setting in a client's relationship worked as follows: “he didn’t actually have to come out…[and] say ‘I’ll get such and such to give you a wee visit’. It was because he had already laid the groundwork by saying ‘I’m involved with this person or that person, this group’” (DLD_13).

Conflict-related coercive control combines inter-related stage-setting tactics: first, group-based stage-setting, drawing on historic-to-contemporary rituals of paramilitary conventions (as outlined above) is established at wider societal/community levels. Second, individual-based stage-setting takes place by a woman's partner based on that context and on gendered tactics.

Group-based stage setting relies on the historic extension of paramilitarisms into social, community, and familial life. Paramilitaries were more often than not referred to as “the community” in the interviews undertaken for this research. The formal threats and reprisals that these groups issue were even referred to as “community threats.” In some instances, paramilitaries are embedded in or formally or informally lead community organizations, cementing their authority over aspects community life (Sturgeon et al., 2024). While this reality is heavily critiqued, it is also the case that “if you speak up about it… you will be a legitimate target” (DLD_02). Combined with broad-based criminal enterprise and exploitation, threats and reprisals for questioning paramilitarisms create a climate of fear, central to stage-setting and establishing the basis for chronic social control of communities. It also establishes the debt-and-reward dialectic outlined before as a key basis of stage-setting. By, for example, establishing control over a community organization and its funding, these groups establish the power to grant or withhold access to community resources, setting up the “choice” and “reward” dynamic, that is, choose to comply, “or else” access to “the community” will be denied. A community worked cited an example where a woman's children “participated in events led by the local community organization, and when [the children] leave [that activity], a knock comes to the door… “you owe us 50 pound”(DLD_02) for whatever material resources the child used. By establishing a debt owed, women are “tied in” and are required to become “involved” in paramilitary activities as a way of paying off the “debt”, and in turn setting the stage for a cycle of control (DLD_02).

Paramilitary groups also use community belonging as a stage-setting device (arising out of paramilitary conventions). The role these groups played as “protectors” of their communities during the conflict in exchange for allegiance, is sustained post-conflict. There remains an equivalence between “the idea of loyalty to the cause” (DLD_25) and to “the community.” The risk of losing that “belonging” enables “preying on the fears of community exclusion (symbolic and literal)” (Walsh, 2023, p. 26). Paramilitaries exploit historic taboos of speaking openly about paramilitarisms, “an activity known colloquially known as “touting” (sic: Walsh, 2023, p. 26), that is, to betray loyalty to the group by reporting them. The idea of touting remains so potent that four victims-survivors mentioned that being labelled “a tout” was one of their greatest fears when determining their “choices” over whether to seek help for abuse (DLD_12, DLD_14, DLD_15, DLD_16). Such tactics engineer the stage upon which coercive threat and control is established and maintained at community levels.

Individual-based one-to-one stage-setting experienced by victims-survivors in this research included those common to IPV, such as grooming and “love-bombing”, introducing family very quickly (DLD_14) and being obsessive and becoming a persistent presence from the outset. One woman described how from the moment she met her now ex-partner “[h]e was stuck like glue with me” (DLD_14). Two respondents noted how they became pregnant very quickly (DLD_12, DLD_15) which for them was something they associated with the pattern of dependencies fostered as part of the abuse that later unfolded in their relationship. For two of the women interviewed, their partners moved into their homes “without having a conversation with me about it” (DLD_15). In one case, upon first meeting him, one interviewee's ex-partner relayed a story of victimhood as a child which she later identified as a coerced sympathy, a tactic of stage setting. When later trying to extract herself from that relationship and the wider paramilitary threat that accompanied it, she was approached on the street by another man, an acquaintance of her ex-partner, who “had the exact same type of stories” (DLD_14). Women raised these patterns as part of their own interpretation and understanding of their experience. For them, they understood that stories of woe are used to construct dependencies between the coercer and the target to stage-set the basis of coercion. And in the case here, they are delivered in tandem between men who know each other/or are involved in paramilitarisms.

Individual-based stage-setting is extended by drawing paramilitary (third-party) stage-setting into the relationship. Material and atmospheric layers from group-based to individual-based stage setting tactics characterizes conflict-related coercive control. The coercer exploits paramilitary social control conventions to evidence the potential for group-based harm coming into the relationship, layering the harm from his own actions. This layering mattered greatly to victims-survivors who talked about how “that definitely raised the level of fear…when he started getting third parties involved…there must be more of them, he's got his whole gang now involved” (DLD_14). Coercers deliberately make their involvement in paramilitarisms known as part of stage-setting: “there was a video sent … the IRA fella I used to go with and his brother…videos of them fighting with boys in the street with hammers and knives …That just made my threat level go up, I was like right, now, I don’t know what he's fully capable of here” (DLD_15).

In some cases, membership is real. In others, it is a feigned affiliation. As one services sector worker noted:

I would have had women come in and …[he’d say to her] “well my uncle is involved in this, and … you open your mouth and you get this and that”… maybe it's half the time the paramilitaries themselves don’t even realise that their group is being used to do this threat…But it's definitely used as a form of control, and silencing and of scare tactics. (DLD_12)

The socio-political context outlined before is significant here. Threats linked to paramilitarisms are understood as real because of women's knowledge of the violence and killing carried out by these groups during and since the end of the conflict. This lends significant potency and meaning to these combined stage-setting tactics: “we have real threat of paramilitaries, you know, your life basically. That's a hell of a lot more scary than just one man, one individual who is trying to coerce you, you are talking about a heavy, heavy big scary group here. That's not to be messed with” (DLD_12). And another:

You’re scared for your life, it's not just one person, it's a whole organisation. It's different with domestic abuse you have you and your abuser. But like with an abuser that's in an organisation, you have them and the people that come along with them. And they’ll look after their own too…they don’t like police, full stop. And anybody chatting to the police is, like, that's a shootable offense. (DLD_15)

Combined, the above establishes paramilitary-related stage-setting, from community into the intimate relationship.

Vulnerability to Coercion

The intersecting social, psychological, economic, political background and wider life experiences of the target of the coercion all play a role in their susceptibility to coercion (Dutton & Goodman, 2005). In the context of this paper, vulnerabilities, including women's children (and “that fear of losing your children” if IPV is reported (DLD_16)), pets and past experiences, are captured in the individual-basis aspect of this box in the model. The group-basis shows that paramilitarisms will be used by partners to generate new vulnerabilities or exploit existing one. For example, poverty is a critical issue in many paramilitary-controlled communities in Northern Ireland and there has been “a real increase in the working poor” (DLD_02). This generates significant vulnerability to financial exploitation and extortion: “during the pandemic, there was one of the women saying ‘the community were delivering food parcels, I didn’t take any.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because the boy who was delivering them to the door was the boy that shot my nephew and how can I take the food… so we starved’” (DLD_02).

Further, his paramilitary status places her in a vulnerable position in relation to accessing services. She cannot say “I don’t want my child to have contact with her father unsupervised”, because “she would have to give reasons why” such as: “he has people in that house that are paramilitaries or he plays paramilitary videos in front of the child.” Rather, “she has this genuine fear” because he is warning her that if she mentions his paramilitary connections that “the repercussions against you is going to be a hell of a lot worse” (DLD_08). For another woman, her partner informed her that their children would be trained to be in the group he commanded, and that “the only reason why he procreated with her was [to] continue to supply the army” (DLD_32). As a result, a support worker noted:

She never felt that her children belonged to her. The children belonged to the cause… She was always under the impression that she wasn’t battling just her husband…It was all the other people within his army as he called it…she felt that she was up against a group that she would never be able to penetrate because she was never included in the ‘us’ [of the group]. (DLD_32)

These vulnerabilities contribute to multilayered stage-setting and the potential for concurrent predatory group-based and individual-based coercive control.

Demand, Threat and Harm: Mechanisms of Paramilitary-Related Coercive Control

Demands and exertion of control follow the above phases. Violence can be used as an instrument of demand as well as an outcome (shown later), although not all coercive control involves acts of violence (Dutton & Goodman, 2005). Under the individual-basis of coercive control, demands common to IPV in other contexts were experienced by women in this research. They included demands related to how she dressed, her movements and finances; sexual demands; isolation from family and community; and the use of violence. Further layers of demand and threat were drawn from paramilitarisms into the relationship and are based on the implicit and chronic presence of paramilitarisms; as well as, demands and threats that make explicit and tactical use of paramilitary conventions.

Implicit and chronic paramilitarisms and related conventions create a context where, for women, “[t]he threat is enough” (DLD_22), that is, the backdrop of paramilitarism within the relationship is enough for demands to be taken seriously and adhered to. For one woman, “the paramilitary threat…nearly sent me over the edge” (DLD_12). For another, described by her support worker, “the physical and sexual violence was horrendous…‘the fear of what he could do to me with regards to the paramilitary links was worse than all the beatings, all the sexual violence’…She felt like her life did not belong to her, it belonged to him and them” (DLD_32).

Drawing on the presence of paramilitarisms, coercers can position a woman in breach of paramilitary conventions. For example, in one case, the spreading of falsified accusations of “touting” or more broadly of drug dealing paramilitary-controlled locations, places women at significant risk of reprisal or expulsion from their community, a tactic deliberately invoked to compel compliance (DLD_14). Threat also involves the coercer letting the target know that they have access to paramilitary weapons and in the case of one victim-survivor, this was used to enact a mock punishment shooting ⁵ to enforce the demand:

He went up to the attic and [got] a black rucksack and held up this gun. And I was panicking…the control just intensified there. But there was a one off incident …where he took me and smashed my car…put me in a headlock… He took me up a back lane and told me to sit there, because he was going off to get this gun. Because he was going to shoot me in the legs. And the fear of that, like, I actually nearly wet myself, I was absolutely terrified. And all this was because I was wearing makeup. (DLD_15)

Demands are also enforced by deliberately implicating her into paramilitary activity. As one woman noted: “they’re trying to get us involved… like, if I’m going down, you’re going down with me sort of thing” (DLD_15) which also enables ongoing demand and threat. She elaborated that “when we split up he would have said things like you know ‘if you ever open your mouth or if you ever come against me you’ll get a bullet to your head’” (DLD _12). Implicating her not only generates inter-dependence but also embeds the reality of threats for women, as elaborated by a police officer regarding a client they had worked with:

She was so fearful because of things he had told her during their relationship. He had told her so many things that he had done, and what he was involved in. He didn’t directly threaten her that someone would come and get her, the fear was there based on the links she knew he had…. he had made threats to set the house on fire. So you know, it was a real fear that she said “I know it would happen, I know he will not do the dirty work. He’ll get someone else to do it.” (DLD_13)

Group-based explicit demand and threat is also evident. One woman was arrested several times and held for questioning by police because of her ex-partners’ paramilitary links. His threat of paramilitary reprisal if she spoke to the police was compounded when her family were “visited by his paramilitary group.” “There was like a big black jeep that landed at my parents’ house, paramilitaries… ‘it's very important you get your daughter to ring us, because she needs to come to a meeting with us…’” (DLD_12). For another woman, group-based demands involved threats of displacement: “[t]hey came to my house—‘get the fuck out of Derry, sort yourself out, are you not gone yet?’” (DLD_14). The involvement of third parties “raised the bar for me. When he mentioned that, and with him turning up with the paramilitary gear on, I near had a heart attack, I thought oh my god, what did I bring to my doorstep?” (DLD_14).

The threat of forced displacement is also used as it holds significant weight whereby, historically, safety meant living in one's own ethno-national community and benefitting from the protection offered by the local armed group in the face of external macro political violence targeting that community. Expulsion today still means risk of being re-housed in “opposing” areas where “opposing” groups reside, as well as being cut off from “safe” community and familial networks. One woman who lived in a loyalist community began a relationship with a man with republican involvement. He approached loyalist paramilitaries in her community for permission to enter her neighborhood to ensure his own safety when seeing her. The consequence of that for her were “threats on my home, that I was going to be put out, … that my house was going to be burnt, and my windows were going to put through” (DLD_15). Her partner did not intervene on her behalf, rather she understood it as another layer of threat and control that he has established over her, and she was now living with threats from both sets of paramilitary “sides.”

Demands and threat are enforced by physical and sexual violence, also a foretelling of what the abuse could escalate towards for non-compliance with demands. Where used, violations are not only “distinctive harms…they are inherent to the coercion, a form of punishment and sanction that are inherent to coercive harm” (Dutton & Goodman, 2005, pp. 743–756). They are also another linkage between the paramilitarism brought into her home and ongoing abuse:

He had left, in my shed…a pipe bomb, with me and the two kids in the house…he was quite dangerous. One night we were out and he knocked me out and I ended up with seven staples in my eyebrow. … He would smash the TV…at one stage he just lifted my head and just banged it off the wall. And I had his footprints on all my ribs. That went on nearly every weekend. (DLD_16)

Violence is directed towards the potential delivery of the ultimate threat. For the same woman: “I always thought that he was going to kill me anyway, in my head…he said it many times. And he had his hands around my throat many times” (DLD_16). In this woman's account, the paramilitarism and abuse are seamlessly interweaved, which was similar to another woman where the abuse “was all very psychological, there was no physical abuse with him, it was all very mental and psychological” (DLD_12). For her “that was the worst relationship I’ve ever been in” as significantly, “the physical stuff is easier proved than the stuff in the background” i.e., the paramilitarism. He would tell her “that's all in your head…I’ve never once said I’ve paramilitary involvement. You are off your head, you run with things…and put me now as a paramilitary.” For her, that made it “hard to get out of as well, you couldn’t have been more alone and feeling that you can’t leave him” (DLD_12). The stage-setting of paramilitarism becomes the central element of the harm experienced in the relationship.

Surveillance

Surveillance is a critical strategy in sustaining the efficacy of the demand and threat (Dutton & Goodman, 2005). Typical to IPV at the individual-basis of the relationship, the coercive partner monitors the target's whereabouts, phone, workplace, emails, etc. After ending the relationship, one woman “changed my number seven times and every time he got it” and he would, for example, text her and say “it's getting dark quite early out there, you watch yourself” (DLD_16). While common in IPV, in this research it became evident that individual-based surveillance is intensified by use of the group-based stage-setting, demand, threat and harm to establish group-based surveillance. Group-based tactics of surveillance draw from the chronic implicit presence of paramilitarisms at community levels. For victims-survivors, coercive control involves a much wider berth of surveillance than that typical of one partner in the context of IPV.

Women's current and former partners used the material resources of paramilitarism for surveillance. For example, for one woman, “it's been like that…from the day I met him, there's been about thirty to forty different cars…it's not just him changing them, it's the whole organisation. They constantly change the cars” (DLD_15). This generates “a really bad feeling… you’re just going to be sick, you’re sitting on edge…because he's constantly in different cars” (DLD_16). Networks of paramilitarism are also used. “[E]ven taxi men …they help organisations. So you can get in a taxi, you could be watched and everything relayed back to him” (DLD_15). And “he [the partner] would text … ‘oh you were wearing a black dress today’…I caught on after a couple of times, that it only happens whenever the grass cutters were [in her estate]. And I knew [then] that he knew somebody in that” (DLD_15). The resources of paramilitary-related surveillance are significant. Service sector workers who support women leaving paramilitary-related relationships have observed that “within literally hours, and I would sometimes even say minutes, they are found, wherever they go to” (DLD_32). One services sector worker described a client they had worked with:

I remember her describing it was like layers of people. [And] they had different roles, so, there was the ones who watched her, and surveyed her…and she would be introduced to these supposed people, as the ones who would be doing any dirty deeds that he wanted…they would be available to kneecap her or shoot her or cut her breast off (a threat related to her recent breast cancer surgery). (DLD_32)

The surveillance is effective. For two victims-survivors, they stopped going out for fear of being followed, being seen by those networks and for reprisals to follow (DLD_16). The control extends to preventing women from moving on. For one woman, “if I get into a relationship with somebody, he’ll have them threatened and pull them into a back of a van” and because “he's known around the city,” his paramilitarism and threatening behaviour means that “everybody's a wee bit weary to come near me. Because of him, because of what he done…” (DLD_15).

Response to Paramilitary-Related Coercive Control: Compliance and Resistance

This research found that “responses” to coercion could be identified at the individual-basis, in the model that box depicts the victim-survivor's responses; at the group-basis, which in the model is the paramilitary climate of fear, coercion and threat that sets up critical barriers to help-seeking; and in addition, in the response services themselves where paramilitarism effects the efficacy of services, as follows:

Response to Coercion by Victim–Survivors: In line with non-conflict IPV, women's responses to coercion involved compliance and in some cases resistance, when safely possible (Dutton & Goodman, 2005). Women interviewed for this research showed extraordinary courage in face of the levels of threat and abuse they had experienced and the very real possibility of repercussions from paramilitarism. All women interviewed had left those relationships, testament to that courage. For periods, however, compliance was part of coping, and is for many women. It has consequences, including a life lived in fear, control and cycles of physical sexual, financial, and psychological abuse. In a conflict-affected environment, it also implies, for some, being forced to partake in or enable their partner's paramilitarism. Women become a cog in the components of control that constitute paramilitary social control.

Further, women “are afraid to report [to police] in case there's retaliation from certain groups within the community” (DLD_13). The retaliation could be “as simple as a knock on the door and a word of warning, or it could escalate right up … arson, your car being set on fire close to your property” (DLD_13). Women in these situations “are just in so much fear …” (DLD_13) and believe that “they [paramilitaries] will know the minute that [the police] have arrived at the door … and they feel more unsafe because of that than they would actually getting a beating from him” (DLD_08). This reaffirms research that evidenced this pattern as a part of the conflict and evidenced to a decreased degree in research on women's experiences of violence post-conflict (Doyle & McWilliams, 2020; McWilliams & Doyle, 2017; McKiernan & McWilliams, 1996)

Tacit and Tactical Coercion by Response Services: Coercion within response services finds expression in two ways. First, is the tacit coercion of services by the chronic presence of paramilitarism. Some service workers expressed fear of dealing with paramilitarism in the lives of women that they support, expressing fears for their own safety for supporting these women (DLD_32). Others explained how support services become ineffective in the face of paramilitary-related controls, that the services they usually extend to victims-survivors “stops dead with paramilitarism” (DLD_08) because they are ineffectual in the face of the fear and control that paramilitarism extends across a community. Given the degree to which forced displacement and burning of homes is a tactic of paramilitarism, housing services were perceived to have become a tacit part of paramilitary social control. In Northern Ireland, at the time of the research, those seeking social housing were given maximum “points” if they have lost their home because of a paramilitary threat. The housing executive relayed in an interview for this research that “the vast majority of people that have paramilitary threats are men” (DLD_23). The criteria of threat however, particularly in the broader legal context, is absent of the kind of gendered analysis needed to capture women's experiences of threat (Turner & Swaine, 2023). A gendered analysis of threat, evident through this research, shows important nuances to the assumption that men experience threat on a more substantial basis than women. Where there is reliance on measuring threats as those that arise through and are reported in formal legalized and policing mechanisms, the kinds of threats that women in this research experienced, such as being killed by their partners who issue threats based on their membership of paramilitarisms, become invisibilized. Such threats are not reported to the police nor logged as “paramilitary threats” in a legal, policing or housing system reliant on formalized reporting criteria. Comparing or suggesting symmetries between men's and women's experiences of paramilitary threat misrepresents the gendered ways that paramilitarisms are experienced by women and how women live paramilitary threat inside their homes.

Impacts of Paramilitary-Related Coercion and Control

The impacts and outcomes of living with IPV and paramilitary-related coercive control are numerous, briefly summarized here. At the individual-basis, in the model showing the realities of victims-survivors, mental illness, stress and anxiety; drug and alcohol addiction; physical ill-health; psychological effects on children; risk of suicide; displacement from the home and isolation from community and family were reported by women. For one woman: “I have post-traumatic stress disorder…You just don’t go through that and just get up and okay, that's all done, then move on from it” (DLD_12). Another was “diagnosed with PTSD …. and I used to feel really suicidal around Christmas time, and I hated Christmas because of him raping me at that time” (DLD_15). Paramilitary involvement also affects the choices women have in how they recover: “I had to do EMDR therapy, ⁶ where you didn’t have to talk about your trauma out loud. That was the only way to deal with that, because I, even with a therapist, I didn’t feel safe enough to tell her ‘oh he raped me’. Because of his involvement with the IRA. That's why I didn’t feel safe” (DLD_15). Similar to the “response” phase, the group-basis of paramilitarism here works to impact women's ability to seek help for the above impacts of the harm on them and their lives.

Delivery of Threat and Harm

Acute expressions of harm and control were experienced by women in this research as part of the delivery of threat and demand, and also as part of punishment for non-compliance with demands. Measures of how a harm becomes or is experienced as “acute” should be determined by women themselves. For example, even without a physical assault, a look or a knock on the door by members of a paramilitary group is enough to deliver the threat that has been feared and/or to make women comply with demands. The model attempts to capture this in the individual-basis level.

The delivery of threat can also involve acute violence. One woman described how her partner “really forced me [into] having sex with him quite a bit” and having failed to comply with coercion to have sex following the birth of their daughter, he violently raped her. She described how “I had stitches … after having her. And he raped me in my living room …and I ended up being hospitalised….all my stitches were torn, infected, and I had an infection in my wound…So I had to deal with the paramilitary side of it and then have him raping me after it” (DLD_15).

Expectations of sexual entitlement and sexual control of women feature in the demand and the delivery of threat in intimate relationships, and within paramilitary convention more broadly (see also: McAlister et al., 2021). As does the engagement of paramilitary members in delivery of threat (see also: Walsh, 2023). A service sector worker described how one of her clients had “dared to go to the police about what he was doing to her…he got this man to beat her literally almost to death…she was battered so much by his soldiers as she called them, she ended up with brain damage, she was in hospital for six months…they turned the gas oven on, she was unconscious, and put her head in the oven” (DLD_32).

Wider conventions such as so-called “punishment” beatings, shootings and forced displacement are a specter to the intimacies of harm happening in women's relationships (as per the socioecological component above). They are also a reality for those working at community levels and for wider service sector workers and leadership (Turner & Swaine, 2023).

Paramilitary Conventionalism: Gendered Social and Coercive Control of Women

This research evidences the gendered nature of paramilitary social control in Northern Ireland and that it is characterized by a multi-layered dynamic of paramilitary conventions-demand-threat-coercion-control, with women at its center. Coercive control of women extends from paramilitary convention and social control at community levels, to individual-based one-to-one control at intimate levels. Women experience paramilitary social- and IPV-related control simultaneously. Not only are they intertwined, but each layer co-constitutes the other. For many women thereby, they are not experienced as distinctive or mutually exclusive. Rather, their experience of post-agreement Troubles-related harm constitutes their everyday experience of harm within and outside their home and relationships. The violence of the conflict is the violence of these women's lives.

Paramilitarisms play a dualistic role. First, paramilitary conventions hold an implicit presence and have come to constitute gendered normative controls within and over a community. This is the broader chronic control that a group or individual coercer will draw from to exert coercive power in a community, home or relationship. Second, paramilitary conventions are used in an explicit and tactical way as a strategic means to threaten, instill fear and ultimately to exert control within a community, home or relationship. Paramilitary-related coercive control is characterized by dualistic interconnected implicit (chronic) and explicit (tactical) modes that operate concurrently and reinforce one another. This enables the social control of both women's lives, as well as entire communities. It positions women as a gendered cog, or a sexualized asset, within the broader wheels of control of communities. Paramilitary conventions are both a means, as well as a manifestation of harm and control over women, their bodies, their children and their wider families. The research evidences that the services sector is also directly affected, as is its ability to respond appropriately to women's needs. That presents barriers to genuine “free choice” around options available to women. Paramilitarism in its tacit and tactical forms present additional barriers that may prevent women from fully disentangling themselves from the multi-layered conflict-related coercive environment and from accessing support for recovery absent of the fears established by paramilitary-based stage setting.

It is evident that women affected by paramilitarisms live their lives within a coercive net, depicted in Figure 2. Women experience (1) partner-based demand-threat-coercion and harm in their relationship that is constitutive of the implicit and explicit use of paramilitary convention; (2) paramilitary group-based demand-threat-coercion and harm on a collective basis, which is constitutive of implicit and explicit use of paramilitary convention and (3) services-based tacit and tactical coercion, where the coercive environment in which services are operating, implicitly and explicitly affects how they operate or are able to respond to the ways that women experience group-to-individual-based coercive control.

Figure 2.

Coercive net of paramilitary-related coercive control.

By using coercive control as a lens; methodologically examining women's experiences through the adapted coercive power framework; and drawing social control into debate with coercive control through gendered analysis, the intersection of historical political, communitarian and group-based social control with everyday gendered coercion and harm of women becomes evident. The research shows that it is not simply a case of examining IPV in a conflict-affected setting or analysing how IPV might be interlinked with conflict. Rather, this approach points us towards how the social control strategies of armed groups rely on and include the control of women at a macro as well as micro/intimate partner level. Where coercive control is analogized with “entrapment” and the “social constructed inability to escape” (Stark, 2007, p. 205), in a context of coercive control by men who are members of an armed group, it is not just an inability to leave a violent relationship, but the inability to leave or “tout” on groups that hitherto represented political identity and sites of political belonging and protection. It also evidences the variant ways that the power of coercive control draws from the context in which abuse takes place, and as noted before, the relevance of where and how women (in this case) are “embedded in their circumstances and relationships” and how that becomes relevant to the basis of everyday violence as part of, not apart from, conflict (Gray, 2019; Innes & Steele, 2018, pp. 152–153). That coercive control is cumulative draws our attention to study how that which is “chronic rather than episodic” (Stark, 2007, p. 246) may be central to the “shadow of violence” (Schlichte, 2009) that characterizes armed group presence and how gendered intimidation, isolation and control fit within the context of the broader control by armed actors. We see in this research both the interlinkages between IPV and conflict and how it is related to it, but also how it is “of” the conflict, part of it (Gray, 2019), and how gendered analysis shows how coercive control may be understood as an effective operative mechanism for armed groups, an element of the armed group strategy of sustaining control of communities.

Conclusion

The paper overall evidences the coercive net that women live their lives within and how that multi-layered coercive environment colours their intimate, familial and community relationships. It reinforces and builds on existing evidence that shows the effects of the during- and post-conflict presence of paramilitarism on women (Doyle & McWilliams, 2020; McKiernan & McWilliams, 1996; Swaine, 2023; WPG, 2022).

The framework evidences that distinctive gendered modes of control of women are part of the subterfuge of wider armed group controls over communities. This research shows that “coercive control” may be understood as form of CRVAW, as well as another way to understand IPV related to armed actors in conflict-affected settings. What may be most significant however is that as a lens and a form of harm, coercive control and its intersection with wider social control strategies of armed groups offers another means to enable visibility of and space for, different women's differentiated subjective and self-apprehended experiences of diverse gendered harm in conflict-affected settings. What is assumed to constitute “conflict-related” gendered, queer, sexualized, racialized and ethno-national driven violences, needs to be radically upended by continuing to expand understanding of less visceral but nonetheless significant harms that are directly and indirectly related to conflict. It is clear that one basis for exploration is the need for much more scrutiny of whether and how predatory armed groups, as masculinized entities, secure their privileges over space and resources, including over women as reproductive and sexual commodities, in ways that emulate how men have been shown to do so in their intimate relationships. This research is nascent, a start, but nonetheless shows that the distinctive nature of coercive control over women and girls in a conflict requires a distinctive analysis and “gendering.” The debates about how to make visible the dynamics of gendered harm in conflict-affected settings are a critical lead point for this work and related fields going forward. The gendered, ethno-national and racialized positioning of women relative to the macro-politics of armed groups requires fulsome analysis during and as shown in this research, after conflict. Expansion of the concept of social control as a gendered phenomenon reflecting gendered social hierarchies and contexts of harm, including conflict-related coercive control, offers a future site of analysis.