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Hilary Matfess, "After Liberation: Women and the Politics of Expectations in Rebel-to-Party Transitions" (Stanford UP, 2026)
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New Books Network Intro Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Dr. Hilary Matthis
hello
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Hilary Matthis about her book titled After Women and the Politics of Expectations in Rebel to Party Transitions, published by Stanford University Press in 2026. Now, this book helps us understand a really important process, set of processes that are all kind of tangled up in each other, right? The idea of any sort of group coming out of a civil war. Well, getting to the point that they can contest a civil war and then win it if they are rebels is hard. It doesn't happen that often. And so there's a lot of questions then around how that group transitions to being the part party afterwards, whether they've completely won the war or they're part of the political system afterwards. Like that is a whole transition in and of itself. That's complicated. Then we can add a whole number of additional factors into it, in this case gender. What happens when the women involved in those movements are a big part of the movement to get to that point of victory, whatever that might look like? What happens to them then? Turns out a whole bunch of different things. And as the word expectations and the title suggests, we're ending up with a bit of a gap between kind of maybe what the promise is of those transitions and some of the realities. So we are going to be talking about a bunch of different places to analyze these sorts of nuances and entanglements, and I think it's going to be quite an interesting discussion. So, Hilary, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [03:04]
Dr. Hilary Matthis
Thank you so much for having me and for such a wonderful introduction to the book subject. I kind of sat back and was like, well, she's said it about as well as I could, so I think we're. We're done here. Let's head home.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I think we actually do have some more introducing to do before we even get into the meat of the book, because, of course, you need to introduce yourself and tell us sort of the origin story of the book.
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Dr. Hilary Matthis
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I've read the finished product, but how did this idea develop? What sorts of questions within this are you asking? Tell us that part, please.
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Dr. Hilary Matthis
Great. Yeah. So I am an assistant professor at the Corbell School at the University of Denver. But prior to moving to Denver, I was getting my PhD, and I went to Ethiopia originally for a project about gender quotas. And it was one of these sort of beautifully serendipitous moments where I went to this meeting of young feminists in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. And I was walking out with a woman that became a very dear friend of mine who had been presenting that night on feminism and the problem of exploited domestic laborers in Ethiopia. And she sort of offhand mentioned that her mother had fought in the liberation war. And having previously worked on women's participation in Boko Haram, I was like, okay, well, tell me everything about your mother. Tell me about, you know, how did she get into this group? Was it, you know, was she one of the only women? And my friend was sort of like, I don't know, delightfully dismissive of my curiosity. She was like, oh, yeah, tons of women participated in the revolution, and I can put you in touch with my mom if you want. And so I, of course, met with her mother, which is, you know, when you're conducting field research, everything feels a little bit sheepish, but especially when it's like, yeah, could I talk to your mom, please? Can your mom come out to play? Basically. But this woman was kind enough to give me some of her time and explain to me how she had been inspired to join the TPLF because of the incredible Government oppression that, you know, she faced as a young. As a young woman in Ethiopia, but also the patriarchal restrictions that she faced as a young woman in Ethiopia. And she connected me to a bunch of her friends who had also participated in the TPLF's fight against the Ethiopian government. And that really kicked off my project. And so, as I started interviewing more and more of these women, one of the things that stood out to me was this incredible tonal shift that would happen when they stopped reminiscing fondly about their time as rebels in the mountains of Tigray and started talking more about the disappointments and frustrations of the political era, which, at least to me seemed like it was a little bit backwards. Right. I expect my war stories to be, you know, stories of hardship and frustration and insecurity and the stories about the peacetime period, particularly for a group like the tplf, where their military victory was undeniable, to be basically a victory lap. And so this project really picks up that question of why women had gone from being lauded as the back burner of the revolution to then being put on the back burner politically.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And obviously, as you've already mentioned, part of figuring out the answer to all of this is speaking with the women themselves. Right. And getting very firsthand accounts of what their experiences were like during conflict and afterwards. You also do some other things too, in terms of answering these questions. So can you tell us about the framework you developed along the way?
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Dr. Hilary Matthis
As I was kind of sifting through and listening to all of these women's incredible stories and thinking about why the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which I realize I've committed now, the cardinal sin of an academic, which is I've used an acronym and not introduced it, but the TPLF stands for the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which is a rebel group that fought between 1976 and 1991 and then served as the most powerful political party in Ethiopia until roughly 2018. So as I was sifting through all of these women's stories, I realized that there were sort of actions and decisions and demands percolating on two different levels. On one level, you had decision making by the party and its officials about what it was going to continue and what it was going to moderate from in the post war period. And that was a process that was happening on a lot of issues. What their economic policies were going to be, how they were going to compromise with a variety of different political players. But it looked especially acute when it came to issue or to questions about women and what roles women should play in in this new society. And at the same time that the party was making all of these kind of decisions and compromises and horse trading in a way that politicians tend to. You also saw decision making at the individual level about what individual female ex combatants from the TPLF were really willing to fight to preserve, about their, their time in the tplf, about the kind of moves towards gender equality that they as individuals had taken as members of the tplf, and what behaviors, activities, attitudes they were willing to forego as they made a really sometimes painful and difficult transition back to civilian life. So in the book, I introduce this as, you know, a more straightforward framework looking at continuity and moderation at both the party level and the individual level.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, those are some very helpful ideas then to keep in mind as we look at them with relation to the TPLF and some of the other places you investigate as well, based then on those kind of initial conversations and findings and thinking about what you were seeing and sort of how to categorize it, I suppose. What were the main things then that you started to look for when, when you were talking to more people and looking at other countries as well?
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Dr. Hilary Matthis
Part of my process of writing and researching this book and conducting interviews also involved leveraging some data that I've collected in a collaborative project with Meredith Loken on women's activities in armed rebellion, the War Project. We have a whole website. It's. I consider it to be the most comprehensive accounting of women's participation in rebel groups currently available. We offer 22 different measures of women's participation in rebel groups for rebel groups between 1945 and 2015. And so I started playing around with this data and connecting it to some of the other political science data sets that measure things, particularly at the party level. And when I went into looking at that data, my expectation was that rebel groups that had incorporated women in large numbers and in, you know, kind of gender transgressive roles, like leaders or combatants, those were going to be your parties that were spearheading initiatives related to gender equality and women's inclusion. And I found that one, the data collection process in and of itself is like a really harrowing experience. And you have your PhD, you know, but as you said in the introduction, the number of rebel groups that can successfully transition to political parties is actually quite small. And then the number of, you know, former rebel parties, as they're called, that are then whose programs and agenda are then assessed in these kind of large cross national data. Sets like the Varieties of Democracy data set is even smaller still. And so this was this, this really frustrating case where I felt like I didn't necessarily have the whole picture. And that's why the book relies so heavily on qualitative information, because quantitatively there's not enough reliable data to do solid causal inference. But as I was looking at this data, what really struck me was that some of the groups, some of the former rebel parties that ended up being the most progressive on women's issues were really kind of tepid when it came to women's incorporation and participation during the war. And I think one of the most notable examples of that is the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which today Rwanda has a reputation as a donor darling. It has widely remarked upon highest levels of women's participation in the parliament. I think something like 60% of its parliamentarians are female. But when the Rwandan Patriotic Front was a rebel group, it was, you know, not particularly impressive when it came to women's participation. And it wasn't even releasing, you know, a ton of propaganda about things like the necessity of women's participation for victory, like a lot of other rebel groups do, even when they, they kind of fail to walk the walk of gender equality. And some of the groups that I would have really expected to be forward leaning on these issues, the, the left wing groups who had that propaganda and who also demonstrably had high numbers of women participating as combatants in the central committee in military leadership positions. You know, their post war policies regarding women and their inclusion of women as party leaders was like functionally the, the shrug emoji. You know, it was a resounding meh. And so I really wanted to investigate, like, what changed from that, that wartime strident, gender egalitarian approach to kind of post war reticence to continue that sort of behavior.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And that's some really intriguing findings just kind of initially. And I'm glad you mentioned the data sets and playing with them because that is often how we find things that kind of don't. Oh, hang on, that doesn't quite line up. But, but we do also, unfortunately also find that there can be gaps in what can be determined from big data sets. So can you tell us a little bit more about the qualitative data you mentioned?
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Dr. Hilary Matthis
Yeah, so I believe it's. Three of the book's qualitative chapters are totally dedicated to the TPLF and their experience in Ethiopia, because I spent the bulk of my fieldwork during graduate school really investigating the TPLF as a political party and the experiences of individual women that had contributed to their fight. And I was profoundly lucky that a large contingent of my interviewees had been really influential women in the tplf, both as a rebel group and as a political party. And so it was through repeated conversations with a lot of these women that, you know, it, it can sometimes really fall into a. A difficult to describe relationship because these, these women, you know, I, I follow the IRB protocols. They always understand, you know, that I am researching women's participation in the TPLF and its causes and its consequences and their role in this. But the, the relationship itself, while grounded in that professionalism and ethical commitment, really became in many ways much, much deeper and much more personal than just kind of interviewer, interviewee, shake hands, we head our separate ways. And so I, I feel tremendously grateful that so many of these women would be willing to confide in me, not just the, the kind of range of experiences that they had in the tplf, but especially to, to trust me with their frustrations and their grievances. Right. And their sense that they had fought for something that they believed in entirely and that the ideals of which they remained committed to, but that they were disappointed in the political party that emerged and how they felt as if they had been shortchanged by that organization. And so it was. It was really tricky as a. As a researcher and as what I would regard as a friend of theirs, to sit with them in that space of feeling frustrated and somewhat abandoned, even as one of the women I interviewed in particular was holding an elite government position at the time, but still found herself feeling as if the TPLF had in many ways, kind of pulled the rug out from under her when it came to questions of women's roles. And one of the parts of the book that I enjoyed writing the most really centers on the Women's Fighters association, which was an all female group within the TPLF that was developed in the mid-1980s and which a lot of these women used to push back against the TPLF for decisions that they disagreed with. And it became a really important kind of space for these women to articulate gender specific grievances and problems and frustrations, even within the context of, you know, an ongoing and really taxing war. And so in the book, I talk about how I was lucky enough to interview women who had been involved in leadership positions in the Women's Fighters association and get to talk to them about how that association became kind of the megaphone and the platform for women to organize within the group to hold TPLF leaders accountable to their lofty, fun kind of left wing 1970s rebel group rhetoric and make sure that it was at least beginning to be implemented in practice, but at the same time that it was a really empowering space for these women. Even that association kind of became co opted by the tplf. So in the book I detail how the association fought back against reforms that would have allowed fighters to get married and to have sex, which had previously been banned for like the first decade of the war. And these women resisted the changes because they, they felt as if if they get married and have children, they would be removed from the front lines and they would give up this really symbolically important role as combatants that put them on equal footing with men. And so the women fought, they had a conference, they were pushing back against the central committee. And it I, I hope you can kind of hear that I'm smiling as I say this because I'm remembering the joy with which some of these women des that conference. Right. They were still literally decades later, really proud of how they had stood up for what they believed in. But those reforms were still passed and eventually the Women's Fighters association was put in charge of helping implement, you know, the decisions that they disagreed so stridently with. And so it captures this, this really tenuous position that a lot of female combatants and female rebels face where they're simultaneously fighting for this broad political cause against, you know, a really specific incumbent government, but also against these patriarchal norms. And winning one fight against the government certainly does not guarantee success in the second fight.
- [19:49]
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- [20:45]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Eduardo
- [20:48]
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- [21:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's exactly, I think, where I want us to go next, because that and those examples there. And obviously, as you mentioned, there are more in the book really demonstrate how big a deal the women were when the TPLF was fighting, right? As you said, they had a whole association, they had conferences. Like, this was not a small, kind of tiny little group of women. That was just one little bit of the movement. What then happened with that transition? Like more specifically, what happened when women tried to hold on to any of these sort of positions of power, Whether that's symbolic, whether that's leadership, what, what happened once the conflict was over?
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Dr. Hilary Matthis
One of the points that I really wanted to hammer home in the book was that this idea of moderation isn't a 180 degree shift, right? It's not a complete reversal. So when the TPLF came to power, it wasn't like they were, you know, it was suddenly a right wing political party that was like a woman's place is in the home. But there were all sorts of social pressures acting on both the political party and individual female combatants that was encouraging them to give up some of the most kind of radical examples of gender equality. And so in the book, I discuss that as kind of patriarchal backlash and patriarchal kudzu. If any of your listeners are from the American south, you know, that kudzu is this. It's a parasitic plant that has totally overrun vegetation in the American south. And it completely, it just drapes itself over the landscape and kills everything underneath it through this kind of creeping vines. And that's, you know, in my imagination, how I always think about patriarchy in the aftermath of war, where it might not necessarily be, you know, like a wildfire that burns everything down very quickly, but it's this patriarchal kudzu that, you know, drapes itself over the gains that women have made and then blocks out the light so. And sucks the nutrients out so that what it's. It's draped over dies anyway. So that's my, my attempt at poetry and prose. But what we saw at the party level was that the tplf, you know, had to start governing in a way that meant a variety of compromises. During the war, the TPLF described itself as, as, you know, kind of modeling itself after Albanian socialists. And I say that because the TPLF I mean, it's, it's more than just a historical quirk. The TPLF was fighting against the Derg, which was the Ethiopian central government at the time that was backed by the Soviet Union. So it was a left wing rebel group that couldn't appeal to the Soviet Union for support. Sort of kind of modeled itself not after the Soviets, but after the Albanians. But then they came to power in the spring of 1991, which if your listeners know their Cold War history, we call that bad luck for a left wing rebel group, right? And so they suddenly, you know, the, the Cold War we thought was basically done. The capitalists had won. America triumphant. Pax Americana is about to happen. And so the TPLF really had to scramble on the international front in order to figure out how it was going to pitch itself in this new international system. And I remember interviewing a man who served as a diplomat for the TPLF during and after the war. And he was like, laughing, telling me, like, oh yeah, basically right after the war I got sent to Europe to convince them all that we were white capitalists the whole time and that it was just rhetoric. And at the same time they were also brokering relationships with important domestic political players. And the TPLF came to power as the head of a coalition called the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front. Sometimes I really miss the, like, ethos of the, the groups of the 70s, right, those rebel groups. Everything's like a People's Revolutionary Democratic association anyway. But the, the EPRDF and the eprdf, even though the TPLF was at the helm, there were other groups incorporated and a lot of them hadn't been as progressive when it came to, to women's inclusion. And then when the EPRDF and the TPLF were trying to kind of get on better terms with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which was and remains a very powerful, powerful force in Ethiopian life. The issue of, of women and gender roles became one of the kind of basically easy bones that they could throw the Orthodox Church, because the TPLF and the EPRDF's objective at the time, their primary objective was not gender equality. It was designing and implementing and drafting a new constitution that would enshrine a system of ethno federal governance in the country. And so in order to achieve that objective, they were willing to compromise on secondary or tertiary or, I don't know if we have a word for fourthuary, but I guess quad objectives, which is where women's rights and equality ended up being. We did see though, again, As I said, it wasn't a complete reversal. The Ethiopian constitution that was adopted under the kind of guidance of the EPRDF and the TPLF included an article that guaranteed women gender equality throughout the country. And integray specifically in the kind of mid to late 90s, we saw a lot of reforms that enshrined into law the policies that the TPLF had had when it came to things like women's rights after divorce, minimum ages of marriage. And so it was these kind of hard fought and really incomplete continuations of wartime promises. And at the individual level, like, you know, it's, it's much harder to capture and it's something that has always irked me. So when I was a baby academic, when I was getting my master's degree, I really thought I wanted to be an economist. And so my kind of natural tendency is to want to be able to have tangible, tangible and comparable metrics of things. But when you're talking about things like attitudes and self confidence and behaviors at the individual level, that's just not available, right? And so in the way that like I can be like, look at this family law adopted into gray and let's compare it to other regions and let's compare it to other countries, it just wasn't available at the individual level. And so that was both frustrating but also something that I think is a really good exercise for those of us that are trained in political science or trained to have a real bias towards tangible empirics. Because it was through these conversations that I saw how individual women, you know, they would retain their identity as a veteran. And it was not just like a, oh yeah, I did that. It was a real source of pride. In the book, I talk about how many houses where I would be interviewing someone in their family room and look around and see, you know, photos of them as young rebels in, you know, their, their khaki fatigues, right next to the photos of their children at college graduation. This was something to be proud of and something to memorialize in their family history. And that was a, a really important factor shaping how these women moved through the world, um, in the post conflict period. But at the same time, a lot of these women talked about the frustrations and difficulties of not being understood when they returned to their communities and were expected to, you know, behave as civilian women. You know, I, I mentioned before, the TPLF fought from 76 to 91 and that's a, a protracted conflict. So for a lot of the members of the tplf, male and Female alike. They had spent a solid chunk of their youth and their formative years in this group and then they were expected to, to leave aside the behaviors and attitudes and kind of quotidian rhythm of rebel life for civilian life. And some of them just didn't know how. And so women that I spoke to, particularly the elite women, talked about how they had a sense that, you know, after war there was gonna be a push for women to quote, go back to the kitchen and that they wanted to resist that. But the push was coming from so many kind of diffuse spaces that it was hard to mount a campaign against it. And one of the women I became closest with talked about and sort of laughed. I mean she was, she's just a formidable force of nature and she had gone on to play really prominent roles in the TPLF after the war. And she talked about how, you know, the mothers of these like hard charging women just didn't understand that because they had expected if they were married and mothers like this woman was after war that they should be home, be tending to their children, not running out for political meetings. And so there's all that sort of diffuse friction that's really hard to quantify and get under your thumb, but nevertheless remains a really powerful force shaping women's lives. Oh God. And at the party level I totally forgot about the, the, the trajectory of the Women's Fighters association which I think captures this, this dynamic of continuity and moderation and co optation. So if you'll forgive me and let me go back to kind of the party level again, the Women's Fighters association after war was combined amalgamated with the, the mass associations for women that the TPLF had been establishing as they took hold of territory and it was transformed first into the Democratic Women's association of Tigray before they dropped to the Democratic and just became the Women's association of Tigray. And in the early years after the war the, the leadership had sort of continued right from the, the wartime hard charging. We were so happy to challenge the leadership women. They remained in leadership positions in the early years of the transition however, because these women remained a thorn in the side of the TPLF and were pressing them to, to make good on their promises. They were eventually removed from those roles by the TPLF as their, their sort of overarching party and you know, if you talk to, to in the, the Women's Associations to. Of Tigray's official narrative after the war became an independent entity and an NGO and they're engaged in Apolitical work. But if you look at who was exercising control over the leadership and the objectives and political program of the Women's association of Tigray, that enduring tie becomes really clear. I certainly don't want to detract from the really important work that the Women's association of Tigray has done in the past and has continued to do through today, even under remarkably difficult circumstances. But it is telling that it went from being a kind of internal sounding board and source of pressure to being an organization that was perhaps more dictated to in terms of what it could do and what it could advocate for.
- [33:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely important to draw out that sort of nuance. And I'm listening to all of this and obviously reading, as you said, the multiple chapters in the book focused on the tplf, thinking obviously about what you're finding there and the challenges the women are facing and kind of holding on to these gains after conflict. But keeping in mind how in some ways the TPLF is quite unusual if we're comparing it to other conflicts. I mean, you and I have both mentioned that a rebel group kind of surviving a civil war is a pretty big deal. It doesn't happen that often, and certainly not that often the way the tplf, as you mentioned, kind of wins a military victory outright. I think perhaps more often we end up with kind of the rebel group survives and maybe they get some amount of political power afterwards, but they're not as dominant as the tplf. Maybe they're sort of more like the opposition party. So if the women are having so much trouble holding on to gains when they've won, what happens to the women who are part of movements that survive the war but don't have as much political power afterwards as the tplf?
- [34:58]
Dr. Hilary Matthis
Yeah, I mean, it's tricky. So in the book, my shadow cases are SWAPO and Namibia, the FMLN in El Salvador, and the CPNM in Nepal. And as I was writing all three of those shadow case studies, one of the things that kept popping up in my mind was really the importance of the political context surrounding the party. Right. And their efforts to try to broker new constituencies while still maintaining their. Their wartime base of support. And it's a really difficult balance to strike. And so I think, you know, to. To think about how this applies more generally to, you know, former rebel parties that don't win decisive military victories or that are not immediate immediately successful within elections. I think that the question is to what extent do they see potential political value in courting Women as a distinct constituency, right? And that requires a lot of different things, right? It requires that women have a sense of gendered political objectives. Right. And shared grievances and experiences based on gender. But it also requires that the existing kind of landscape of political parties isn't serving that need. Right? And so it's almost like. Feels like a Rube Goldberg machine, really, because it's like, okay, so the group has to survive in some form or fashion and contest in elections. And women have to have a sense of, you know, political wholeness. Both back in the olden days when I took like, one course that touched upon sociology and movement building, right? It's like, what's your cat neck? What's cat net? What's the extent to which you identify as a category? What's your network connecting you? Right? So it's like, okay, and do women have a high enough cat net? Right? And then it's. No other political party managed to see that. And so, you know, as a. A feminist living in a time of what I consider to be acute political backlash, I just keep thinking to myself, like, okay, so if we're concerned about women's rights and representation in the aftermath of conflict or just in general, a really critical thing is identifying the. The political utility that they could provide a party and then kind of horse trade that for concessions when it comes to women's rights and representation. And I'm far from the. The first one to kind of make that somewhat uninspiring and very transactional argument. And for. For people that are interested, Don Teal has a great book about forging the franchise where it, you know, really is like, political parties endorsing women's right to vote only when they think it's going to benefit them politically. And so thinking through, like, okay, how can women's wings that were forged during war become important civil society actors or party wings after war that aren't just kind of dictated to by the party, the kind of little sister of the party's organization itself, but really compelling political players that can trade their influence for political concessions in the realm of rights of representation.
- [38:48]
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- [38:57]
Dr. Hilary Matthis
It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take
- [39:00]
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- [39:02]
Dr. Hilary Matthis
It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor.
- [39:06]
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- [39:08]
Dr. Hilary Matthis
No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle.
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- [40:18]
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- [40:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And so in your shadow cases then, what were some of the things that makes it more or less possible for women to be seen as veterans, to have party politics that aren't just fully excluding them?
- [41:04]
Dr. Hilary Matthis
One of the things that I've been focused on now, and I sort of feel like you're you're interviewing me about one project and I keep wanting to pull in what it is I'm working on now. But throughout the book I was really fascinated by the post conflict trajectory of these women's wings, which is a term that we use to describe just any all female unit affiliated with an armed group, be it combat like the Women's Fighters association or non combat groups. Really these organizations as former rebel parties began their transition could become really important ways of, for women to solidify both their, their expectations and try and translate their wartime service into tangible post war gains. And so, you know, there was a huge debate within the constituent parties of the fmln, each of which had their own, I was about to say proprietary, which is definitely not the word, but I'll use it, their own proprietary women's wings that was just affiliated with each of those constituent groups. And there was a huge debate amongst all of these women's wings about the best strategy. Was it to be associated with the FMLN as a political party or would they be better served by breaking off and being independent? And it's, you know, it's not a debate that I can clearly find myself landing on either side from right because if you sever ties with the political party completely, then you trade the possibility of access and you know, integration into political networks comes with a lot of benefits. You can be, to quote Hamilton in the room where it happens, but you might also be dictated to, you might also be co opted, you might depend upon the party for your funding. It's definitely fraught. And being independent, you can decide what it is you're doing for yourself, but you also make yourself a target for potential government censorship. And you're then in a position where you might have to fundraise and cultivate networks and strategies that you might not have experience cultivating. And so I think these women's wings become important ways to push for change at the party level. The tplf, the Women's association of Tigray, was really involved, for example, in making sure that the constitution had a separate article guaranteeing women equal rights. Because previously the draft constitution that the government circulated I believe kind of included it was like women, children and disabled people, from remembering correctly, all within one heading. And women wanted to separate themselves out because they saw that as a sort of demeaning to women's abilities and capabilities. And it was a successful push. I also think that these women's wings become really valuable at that individual level for helping women preserve their sense of kind of ven, excuse me, their sense of veteran identity and also have a group of like minded people who aren't necessarily pushing them to return to traditional gender roles in the aftermath of war. So I, you know, without, without getting too far over my skis on some of the work I'm currently doing on women's Wings. I do think that was one of the most interesting things that came out of this, was the extent to which those organizations, as imperfect as they were, as frequently as they were co opted, could still serve really important and powerful roles in determining former rebel parties policies, as well as allowing women the space and the social networks to continue pushing against patriarchal norms in their individual lives.
- [45:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think that's definitely a key takeaway from investigating these organizations. Are there any other big implications of this research that we want to include in our discussion?
- [45:21]
Dr. Hilary Matthis
The implications that emerge from this work really come down to thinking through both at that party and individual level. What are the opportunities to continue gender egalitarian practices and laws and what are the pressures to moderate from them? And how can we, as activists, policymakers, academics that are interested in, in promoting gender equality, kind of maximize the opportunity for continuity and minimize the pressure to moderate? And part of that, at least for me, is really engaging closely with women's wings that were established during war, as well as women's associations that are established by female veterans, which can often emerge when you have the kind of downtime and space available if you're in cantonment after a ceasefire in the process of peace negotiations. I also think one of the really clear policy implications of this is that we can't necessarily trust our gut intuition. I think if you had asked a lot of commentators contemporary to the fmlm, the cpnm, the tplf, if these organizations were gonna work towards women's rights in a really kind of dutiful and earnest way, we would have said yes. I say we. I was not a contemporary for most of these movements, but you know, that would have been the expectation and it suggests that like, we can't kind of let up when it comes to really intervening and providing post conflict support aimed at female veterans just because the organization has gender egalitarian politics. It also suggests that some of the groups that, you know, were tepid when it came to women's rights and inclusion during war might actually be some of the groups that are the most open to post conflict reforms related to, you know, gender equality. And so I think, you know, we might have left some opportunities on the table by just assuming that, you know, groups that were not particularly interested in gender equality during the war wouldn't be interested in adopting gender quotas, legal reforms, including women in high ranking party and government positions, and might have then allowed for these groups to really co opt women's movements instead of offering an opportunity for women's groups to be incorporated or women's Rights to be incorporated in a way that was kind of less performative and more earnest. The final thing I'll say is one of my deep frustrations as I read about disarmament, demobilization reintegration programs, typically known by their acronym DDR, is that they often expect women to return to performing traditionally feminine roles. Right. So if you look at a lot of the job training programs associated with DDR programs for female combatants, you'll see it's things like hairdressing and tailoring and, you know, kind of soft, feminine, traditionally jobs that are done by women. But a lot of these women joined organizations, joined rebel groups in order to break away from these gendered norms. And so, you know, DDR programs need to be much more sensitive to the, the kind of aspirations and expectations of female rebels as they're, they're exiting these groups. I, in one of my classes on women, war and peace, I assign an article that. I'm not going to remember the quote exactly, but it's one of the directors of Columbia's DDR program talking about helping women in the FARC reclaim their femininity. And while I'm sure that some women are grateful for that, a lot of women in the FARC are quite proud of the gender transgressive, gender bending roles that they engaged in and in fact joined the FARC in order to escape some of the patriarchal expectations levied upon them as young women. So I would hope that this, this project can also help inspire policymakers to really consider what aspects of rebel life and rebel identity that individual combatants, male and female alike, are hoping to preserve into the post war period.
- [50:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Those are some very good takeaways indeed. So helpful to have clarified. Is there anything then you'd like to tell us about your current work? You mentioned it a moment ago. Is there anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [50:22]
Dr. Hilary Matthis
Yes. So I am delighted that the United Nations Complex Risks Analytics Fund has, excuse me, has provided support to me, Dr. Meredith Loken and Dr. Jenny Headstrom to expand the women's activities and armed rebellion data set with a particular focus on these women's wings. And so now with a team of something like 20 research assistants at the University of Denver, were trying to expand to cover the extent of women's participation in roughly a thousand non state armed groups and detail if they have women's wings, what these women's wings did, whether or not they survived into the post conflict period and the implications of the creation of these groups for women's experiences during and after war. And we're complementing this cross national data collection with two qualitative case studies, one looking at the women's wings affiliated with ethnic armed groups in Myanmar and the other looking at the women's wings in Tigray's most recent war from 2020 to 2022, where instead of establishing a women's fighters association like they did under the TPLF in the 1970s through 1991, they have what they they called a gender focal person system, which is a much more decentralized, much less autonomous women's wing. So I'm exploring kind of why the women's wing took that form in the most recent war and how the the previous lessons from the TPLF encouraged the leaders of this Tigrayan armed group to kind of prevent a women's association from forming that would have the authority to challenge the rebel central leadership. So I'm happily went back to Gray this July, went back to Addis in December, and I'm looking forward to doing more fieldwork, really getting into women's wings and their significance.
- [52:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds very interesting. So best of luck to you and what sounds like a large team all working together. And of course, while you are all doing that, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled After Women and the Politics of Expectation in Rebel to Party Transitions, published by Stanford University Press in 2026. Hilary, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [53:03]
Dr. Hilary Matthis
Thank you so much for having me. I didn't expect this. TikTok has more short dramas than I could ever finish. Each episode leaves you wanting the next. Download TikTok now and try it.