Contested Girlhoods: The (In)Visibility of Girls Associated with Armed Groups in the Horn of Africa

Despite the wealth of feminist research identifying women’s integral presence in armed groups, the experiences of women and girls continue to be overlooked in both literature and in policy. This paper draws on critical studies of gender and political violence to map the militarisation of women and girls in the Horn of Africa, bringing testimonies of armed female youth in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia into conversation with one another. In doing so, this research destabilises boundaries of conflict analyses to explore the gendered patterns and trends that apply across asymmetric warfare, military training bases and within armed extremist groups. It examines the correlation between sexual violence and women’s mobilisation, arguing that this relationship remains underexplored in questions of how, when, why and which women participate in political violence. Additionally, it builds on the research of J. Marshall Beier, Jana Tabak and others who identify age as a critically analytical category in international relations, asking how the lived experiences of girls who perform political violence is reconciled with an international agenda that consistently undervalues children’s capacity to be simultaneous victims and perpetrators. Integrating a study of childhood, gender and history into political science discourse on extremist groups, this paper asks who and what is made visible when we pan our focus away from acts of terror to encompass other forms of child labour and child soldiering. It situates the experiences of girls associated with Al-Shabaab in Somalia, and other extremist groups in Ethiopia and Eritrea, within the literature on the childhood-securitisation nexus, subverting the masculine-coded emphasis on ‘radicalisation’ to identify the varied, gendered ways through which girls are mobilised for political violence. This research is conducted as part of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council standard grant, ‘Children of War: Evolving Local and Global Understandings of Child Soldiering in Africa’ at the University of Exeter.