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Through disproportionate restrictions placed on women's movement and visualization within its "caliphate", the Islamic State (IS) group enforced its policies of female domesticity and submission. Studies on IS governance of local Iraqi, Syrian and Kurdish women have focused overwhelmingly on their victimization, abuse, and restricted agency. By contrast, this paper uncovers the opportunities, activities, and impacts of individual and collective nonviolent resistance led by local Sunni and Yazidi women. Through endeavors such as personal resilience, individual confrontations, and even group protest, local female civilian women acted against the group's policies, members, ideology, and expectations of female passivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The PKK's gender policy, which includes maintaining a fighting force that is 40% female and the promotion of women's liberation as a key component of its political platform, makes the PKK an outlier among both Kurdish nationalist groups and leftist armed movements in the Middle East. Based on interviews with members of the PKK's allied civilian political movement and former PKK combatants, this paper argues that rather than being a function of the PKK's ethnic or ideological identities, this policy emerged as a result of a confluence of four other factors: the PKK's leftist ideology, the preferences of its leadership, and the need to recruit selectively all served as permissive factors. Ultimately, however, it was the greater participation of Kurdish women as a result of Turkish state violence in the Kurdish southeast in the 1980s that ultimately changed the PKK from within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The civil conflict in Colombia has gained attention in part for the inclusion of women in rebel forces and peace negotiations between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Scholarship has often explained the FARC's decision to mobilize women as both an ideological and tactical move, designed to increase the ranks of the organization and signal commitment to leftist principles. In this paper, I argue that the incorporation of women into Colombia's civil war is better understood by viewing the country's various leftist armed movements (including the ELN, EPL, and M-19) through a comparative framework. By applying the theoretical concept of outbidding, I argue that the mobilization and expansion of women's roles in Colombian armed groups was in fact an intersubjective process, driven by competition among leftist movements existing in a crowded marketplace. In contrast to alternative explanations that focus on mobilization as an elite-driven process, I argue that the outbidding dynamic exposes agency among women recruited to these groups and demonstrates the potential for women to create strategic openings in times of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]