SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

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Swedish National Defence College (Försvarshögskolan), Stockholm

Postal address: Box 278 05, SE-115 93 Stockholm, Sweden
Visiting address: Drottning Kristinas väg 37 (by the campus of the Royal College of Technology)
Web page: http://www.fhs.se/en/

Contact person: Dr. Romulo Enmark, Vice-Chancellor from 1 January 2011. He previously comes from Halmstad University where he has served as Vice-Chancellor since 2000.

South Asia related research

In November 2010, Dr. Kristine Eck was given SEK 1.7 m as a post-doc scholarship from the Swedish Research Council, to carry out a project entitled ”Women at War: Explaining Differential Levels of Female Participation in Rebellion” – partly focusing on Nepal – during the period 2011-12. The project will be carried out at the Swedish National Defence College (Försvarshögskolan) in Stockholm, which means Kristine will move over to this institution from the Dept. of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, where she studied before (and defended her doctoral dissertation in June 2010).
Project abstract: The aim of this project is to answer the question: why do levels of female participation in rebellion vary? Some rebel groups discourage female participation, while in others women compose a majority of the troops. Almost all previous research has failed to address why this variation occurs, probably because warfare is still assumed by most
researchers and practitioners to be an exclusively male activity. Without understanding what explains differential levels of female participation in rebellion, researchers will retain a flawed and incomplete conception of armed conflict and practitioners will find that their policies create negative externalities for the female population. The handful of studies on this topic which have addressed female participation are historical narratives that examine only cases where there have been high levels of female participation in rebellion.
This project thus advances the study of female participation in two ways. First, it suggests a number of new theoretical avenues, namely, explanations built on culture, developmental psychology, and characteristics of the armed conflict. Second, it will test these theoretical explanations with a comparative study of five different armed conflicts in which there is variation in the level of female participation. This will allow the study to be the first to employ the type of systematic, comparative methodology needed to draw inferences.

More information on Dr. Eck’s previous reserach at Uppsala University.