Not enough soldier, not enough civilian

Women soldiers are grossly under-represented in Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes when compared to their actual number in fighting forces. Even though the everyday reasons for this phenomenon are increasingly understood, the ideological and class-based explanations remain underexplored. In this chapter, I answer to this call from feminist peace research perspective. I argue that both mainstream women’s organisations as well as state-building traditionalists tend to justify the neglect of women soldiers along similar lines of reasoning: more urgent matters need to be prioritised rather than this “marginal” phenomenon. In practice, a woman soldier is not enough civilian in the eyes of mainstream women’s organisations, but she is simultaneously not enough soldier in the eyes of DDR practitioners, and, as a result, she remains neglected. This chapter demonstrates the resourcefulness of feminist peace research in highly fragile environments and exemplifies its power to provide empirically informed analysis to serve academics and policy-makers alike.