查看文章

Young women are combatants in contemporary African wars. They also participate in a whole array of different roles. However, by and large, they remain invisible to us. In fact, our hackneyed ‘Northern’views on women’s innate non-participation in war prevent us from seeing the specific needs of young women during and in the aftermath of wars. For instance, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (ddr) programmes often fail to address the appropriate needs of young women and in a variety of ways ‘prevent’them from participating. Issues of stigma, safe demobilization, and individual concerns about post-war marriage, health and education need to be addressed both in a more gendered way, and with an appropriate understanding of young women’s agency in both peace and war. In this Policy dialogue it is argued that to improve policy and programming efforts it is necessary to broaden the understanding of young women’s roles and participation in armed conflict in Africa historically and today. The intention in this text is to provide policy makers and aid practitioners with a state-of-the-art overview of the situation for young women in African war and post-war situations. In chapter one, after a brief introduction on women and war in general, we provide an overview of women’s participation in armed forces in conflicts in Africa (section 1.1). Here the importance of historical and political contexts for women’s participation in armed conflict is emphasized, and the notion of gender roles in African countries is discussed. We proceed to discuss girls and women in armed forces and rebel groups, and pay attention to various modes of conscription …