Berghof Foundation: 50 years of conflict transformation

Supporting female
ex-combatants from
resistance and liberation
movements
2018–present
One of the participants in the film project prepares to be interviewed. Photo: Juan Camilo Cruz Orrego / Berghof Foundation
Although women comprise up to 30 per cent of
the membership of various armed resistance and
liberation movements (RLMs), their voices and
aspirations are regularly sidelined during peace
negotiations and post-war transitions. The role
played by female combatants in conflict is often
challenging to translate into participation in peace
processes and post-war political settings, where men
routinely assume leadership positions and expect
women to find their place in the domestic sphere. The
Berghof Foundation has been working with various
RLMs on negotiation and process support since
2005. Most representatives in this project, and hence
most of the supported actors, were men, prompting
one of Berghof’s long-term external consultants
to pose the question: why not engage directly with
women who have fought in RLMs?
This led to an intense process of networkbuilding
among female ex-combatants in various
countries where RLMs were involved in negotiations
and peace processes. In parallel, the search for
funding for this work began and initially presented a
challenge: female ex-combatants were a somewhat
overlooked target group, their participation and
leadership in post-war politics and reintegration into
society being issues that did not feature prominently
on the international agenda. Additionally, both
domestically and internationally, there was some lack
of recognition of female ex-combatants’ potential for
driving positive change due to their past involvement
in armed conflict and higher social marginalisation
and stigmatisation compared to their male peers.
After several attempts at searching for support, a
small pilot project was eventually initiated in 2014
with funding from the Robert Bosch Foundation;
subsequent grants were provided by the German
development agency GIZ and the Norwegian Agency
for Development Cooperation (NORAD).
In the last few years, the Berghof
Foundation has supported women from 11 RLMs
across three continents in their efforts to ensure
more gender-inclusive and gender-participatory
peace negotiations and post-war democratic
transitions. The experiences of women from
five other groups that underwent war-to peace
transitions 10-15 years ago have also been gathered
and documented. For this, we worked with six
local researchers, most of whom are themselves
ex-combatants from demobilised armed groups in
Aceh (Indonesia), Burundi, Mindanao (Philippines)
and Nepal. The researchers collected and shared
firsthand knowledge of the experiences of female
combatants and their engagement in socio-political
transformation processes. Overall, they recorded
43 video interviews with their peers, identifying key
lessons learned from their shared experiences. The
resulting short film and booklet, ‘I Have To Speak’ —
Voices of Female Ex-Combatants, seek to amplify
some of the hidden and forgotten voices in conflict
and show that women and their experiences of
armed conflict need to be taken seriously in order
to build sustainable peace. They also aim to show
other female ex-combatants that they are not alone
in their sense of being marginalised during such
war-to-peace transitions, and that they have reason
to feel empowered by their strength and resilience.
The stories collected are those of friendship and
camaraderie, of life and death, of perseverance
and resistance, and of rebuilding lives after war and
continuing the struggle in peaceful ways. Tripani
Baijali, one of the researchers from Nepal, believes
that “[the women’s] political awareness, skills and
experiences should be transformed into useful
human resources for the mainstream political scene
by creating opportunities for them.” The interviews,
film and stories are now used to train and build the
capacities of women in RLMs who are currently in the
process of emerging from armed struggle.
An example of tangible outcomes of
Berghof’s support for female ex-combatants is
our work with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front
in Mindanao (Philippines), which successfully
transitioned into a post-war political party following
the peace agreement in 2014. Since then, the Berghof
Foundation has supported its women’s brigade,
the Bangsamoro Islamic Women Auxiliary Brigade
(BIWAB), in preparing itself for the prospect of postwar
organisational transition. In late 2019, together
with our local partner organisation, the Moro Women
Development and Cultural Center (MWDECC),
the Berghof team conducted tailor-made training
for 32 central BIWAB members looking at options
for establishing a self-led post-war ex-combatant
women’s civilian association and developing a
mission and aim for such an association. Following
the training, BIWAB legally transformed itself into
a regional association aiming to self-lead collective
capacity-building for the political participation of
women ex-combatants and to support women in the
implementation of the peace agreement and postwar
politics in Mindanao.
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