Women and Guerrilla Movements by Karen Kampwirth

Author:Karen Kampwirth [Kampwirth, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Women's Studies, Political Science, General, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9780271045894
Google: 94xJL1wgw2kC
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2010-11-15T02:58:04+00:00

Conclusion: New Questions for Revolutionary Studies

During the twentieth century, the field of revolutionary studies was dominated by two versions of a single question: Under what circumstances have revolutionaries succeeded in overthrowing states? or, Under what circumstances have states fallen to revolutionary movements? That question served the field well over the course of the last century, informing generations of interesting studies.

But perhaps a new century requires new questions. Perhaps it is now time to move on intellectually. There are a number of reasons to do so. First, the end of the cold war has changed both the resources available to revolutionary movements and the resources available to the dictatorships they opposed. Some have suggested that the age of revolution came to an end with the end of the cold war; others have suggested that revolutionary movements will continue to emerge as long as there is local injustice (see, for example, Goodwin 2001; Selbin 2001). A third position, one that I subscribe to, would be that the end of the cold war changed the international context in significant ways, but its termination did not always eliminate local grievances; in fact, it sometimes aggravated them. Under those circumstances, we will continue to see the periodic emergence of revolutionary movements, but ones that will differ from the Marxist-Leninist movements of the cold war era, ones that, like the EZLN of Chiapas, may not even demand the overthrow of the state. A statecentric approach may not serve us well if we hope to understand these post–cold war revolutionaries.

A second reason for expanding our questions, and increasing the pluralism of our methodologies, is that revolutionary movements in the post–cold war world are too complicated to be understood within the confines of a single question. Indeed, they have always been too complicated to fit well into those confines. Focusing our analysis on the moment of overthrow flattens the experience of revolutionaries, thus doing a real disservice to the revolutionaries themselves, and to those of us who study them. Many interesting questions do not easily fit within the confines of the central question and so have not been asked. But by putting aside the central question, I was free to ask others. Those questions included, How does gender as a central category of analysis help to explain revolutionary movements? and How and why were large numbers of women mobilized into Latin American guerrilla movements beginning in the late 1960s? But these questions only scratch the surface of all the questions that could be addressed, if only the central question were set aside. In this book, I have touched on a few of the following questions, but there is still much exciting intellectual work to be done.

FACTORS THAT LED TO MOBILIZATION OF WOMEN AS GUERRILLAS

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