This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Tara Chandra, a consultant and independent researcher who received a PhD in Political Science with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from UC Berkeley.
Chandra’s research focuses on the intersection of gender and international security. Prior to beginning her PhD, she worked in foreign policy in Washington, D.C. She holds a Master’s degree in Global Affairs from Yale and a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago.
The interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at Social Science Matrix, and focused on Chandra’s work on gendered violence in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. [Note that the interview was conducted while Chandra was still a PhD candidate.]
Listen to the interview below or on Apple Podcasts.
Podcast Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[WOMAN’S VOICE] The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
[JULIA SIZEK] Hello and welcome to the Matrix Podcast. I’m your host, Julia Sizek. And today, we’re speaking with Tara Chandra, who is a PhD candidate in political science at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender and international security. And today, we’ll be speaking about her work on gendered violence in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. Thanks for coming.
[TARA CHANDRA] Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.
[SIZEK] So let’s get started with sort of the big question, which is, where does violence against women fit into the larger battle between insurgents and counterinsurgents?
[CHANDRA] Yeah, that’s a great question. My research looks more at the changes that happen in targeting of women during counterinsurgency operations. And I actually find that counterinsurgents’ behavior and presence can increase incentives for insurgents to target women.
So contrary to kind of what’s out there, a lot of folks will say, oh, violence against women is an inevitable part of conflict. There’s existing research that shows in particular that sexual violence is not something that is inevitable in war. That — there’s a great article by Elizabeth Wood, “Rape in War is Not Inevitable.”
And I kind of build on this considering other forms of violence against women, kind of expanding on the literature that has focused largely on sexual violence. And I find that there are changes both within conflicts over time — actors of the same ideological persuasion will decide to allocate resources towards targeting women at certain points in conflict, and less allocation happens towards those kinds of attacks at other points in conflict — and then also between conflicts where the actors are kind of the same ideological persuasion.
You see a lot of difference in both the kind of investment in the intensity of violence against women but also the kind of form that that violence takes. And so my research kind of investigates why that is. And then I find that it is largely dependent on the actor who is performing the counterinsurgency that can actually change the incentives for insurgents to behave in particular ways.
And just to give you a really quick example, I guess a couple of examples I can point to, we think of Boko Haram, for example, as a group that really targets schoolgirls in particular, right? In 2014, they abducted about 270 schoolgirls from a town in Northeastern Nigeria called Chibok.
And this was the really infamous– if you were kind of around, politically active or on Twitter in 2014, you would have seen Michelle Obama and Malala Yousafzai started the– participated in, I don’t know who started it, but participated in the #BringBackOurGirlsCampaign.
And so this idea that these girls– this was a group that goes around abducting schoolgirls. And a lot of people thought that this was a really natural behavior for the group to do, particularly because the group’s name, when translated loosely, means “Western education is forbidden.”
And so a lot of people thought, well, this is natural. This group doesn’t want girls to go to school. They’re targeting schoolgirls. But actually, if you look at just a couple of years prior to the Chibok abduction, only about half a percent of the attacks that the group perpetrated took the form of abduction.
And by 2014, when they did the Chibok abduction, that number had risen to almost 14 percent. So that kind of variation between different points of a conflict is what my research really focuses on.
And I find that what happened between 2012 and 2014 was that the Nigerian government really started to perpetrate a much stronger counterinsurgency mission, and that that changed the incentives on the ground and the strategic dynamics that the group was facing. And so they really had to change their resource allocation towards different types of attacks. And that was one of the things that they tried and actually managed to then undermine — the Nigerian government extracted quite significant concessions from them.
So that’s like a sort of a motivating example. Another case that I look at is Somalia, and I look at Al-Shabab. And that’s a group that also is sort of considered to be a group that really targets women. And they were incredibly repressive in the years prior to the African Union mission in Somalia.
AMISOM came in and did a lot of counterinsurgency to deal with Al-Shabab. And prior to AMISOM being really ramped up and doing kind of much more robust counterinsurgency, they were– the group was very repressive towards women.
There really particularly stories of how they would– women couldn’t leave the house without wearing an abaya, which is a particular kind of covering. But they were not they would not perpetrate sexual violence against women.
But once AMISOM came in and started to really challenge the group on the ground, it changed the dynamics for the group. And it really– actually, you could see the change in their behavior because then after there was a much more robust counterinsurgency, that’s when they started to do a lot more sexual violence.
So these kinds of things like why do these changes happen in the middle of conflict is kind of what my research focuses on. And that’s the– bringing in the relationship to counterinsurgency, I think is the kind of new piece of it that I’m bringing.
[SIZEK] Yeah. So this raises a question about sort of the nature of the dynamic between insurgency and counterinsurgency and how this has changed over time. You mentioned that Boko Haram changed their strategy from not doing these abductions to doing abductions.
So how have these theories of counterinsurgency and insurgency changed over time? And where does your research sort of fit into these understandings of counterinsurgency?
[CHANDRA] Yeah, I think– well, it’s interesting because I think one of the advantages of being the insurgent group is that you kind of can throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. And so counterinsurgents, because they are national militaries or they’re representing international coalitions, they’re required to, in theory, abide by the laws of armed conflict and international humanitarian law.
And so they’re limited in what they can do. And also, just training an entire military operation is much more regimented and disciplined than being an insurgent, where they obviously do planning, but their training is much less disciplined than kind of what a national military would do.
And then thinking about even a doctrine for a military that’s as big as the US operation in Iraq. I mean, that requires a lot of planning, a lot of thinking, and then really shuffling down all the way to the operational– from the operational to the strategic to the tactical on the ground, what people are doing day-to-day requires a lot of training and a lot of discipline. And there’s a lot of work that goes into that.
So changing that last minute in response to what insurgents are doing can be quite tricky. And so that is why you kind of get this dynamic where you have counterinsurgents who are militarily much stronger than the insurgents just almost all the time.
That’s just kind of the nature of doing counterinsurgency. But oftentimes, insurgents have particular other advantages. And one of the advantages they have is that they can be much more nimble, and they learn and adapt much quicker than the counterinsurgents do.
They learn very quickly. And this is kind of part of what my research finds is they learn very quickly what the weak spots are for the counterinsurgent.
And so my research finds that, for certain types of counter insurgents, in particular, I find that counterinsurgents who are domestic actors — meaning like national militaries doing counterinsurgency in their own borders — they are much more susceptible to being undermined by insurgents based on gender-based violence.
So I think that there’s kind of like– I wouldn’t necessarily– I don’t know if insurgents have a theory of insurgency that they’re necessarily adhering to. I think they have a lot of advantages that they avail themselves of.
There’s a great quote in the field manual, the counterinsurgency field manual, which is what the US government uses now, I think, as it’s sort of like theory of counterinsurgency, which is insurgents succeed by sowing chaos and disorder anywhere. The government, or the counterinsurgent, fails unless it maintains a degree of order everywhere, right? So the bars of success for insurgents and counterinsurgents are also wildly different. So I think insurgencies are interesting from that perspective.
But in terms of changes of theories of counterinsurgency, there’s actually been a lot of development on that front. And what’s so interesting about studying this time period is that the development of the kind of contemporary counterinsurgency doctrine occurred during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So it’s pretty recent.
And one of the really interesting findings for me was talking to interview subjects who were in Iraq in the very first wave of the invasion, so people were there in like 2003, 2004, and asking them kind of, what was your training, what was your experience?
And it was wildly different and much sort of– much less developed and much less robust than folks who served in the surge, which started in 2007. But if you talk to people who served in like 2009, they just had much more training, much more emphasis on culture, understanding the culture, understanding kind of social norms.
So I think, you know, the US government learned and developed that theory better over time, but it did take a while. And so this was kind of the, you know, the, like, winning hearts and minds theory, which is the broader overarching idea, is that you only win in insurgency–
–against an insurgency if you are winning hearts and minds of the local population, because you can’t succeed without the support and cooperation of the local population. And so this was the idea that you really need to– you can’t do it coercively. And so that really was developed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[SIZEK] So this brings us back to women as perhaps, famously, women who are in these villages while the men are out doing insurgency activities, become a really important player in this battle between the insurgents and counterinsurgents.
So what is valuable for insurgents to target women specifically? And what are the sort of mechanisms that you have identified in your work as to why they would want to do that?
[CHANDRA] Yeah, so the theory that I propose has two parts. The first is that the actor who is conducting the counterinsurgency matters a lot. And I will just briefly outline why I argue this and why I find support for this, because in Nigeria against Boko Haram, it was very clear that the Nigerian people had a clear expectation that their government should not only protect its own citizens from these kinds of attacks, but that once they happened, they should be able to retrieve the citizens.
So the fact that the Chibok schoolgirls, it took so long for them to be returned — and not all of them were returned — was a real challenge for the government politically because people had– its own citizens had this expectation, and the metric of success that they were using in determining whether they would continue to support the government’s operations, was– like, were they– did these– one of the key metrics was, are they going to get these girls back?
And on the other hand, if you look at something like the war in Iraq, there’s a lot of evidence that Americans had a very high awareness — this was something that I found just in polling data from the kind of mid 2000s — that Americans had a very high awareness of how many American soldiers had died in the Iraq War, but really low awareness of how many Iraqi civilians had died.
So it was very clear that the metric of success that the US government was using to continue to gather support from its own electorate was how many service members are dying in Iraq, not how many Iraqi civilians are dying.
So what I said earlier is that insurgents are very good at learning the weak spots of the government. And so I think — it became very clear in Nigeria that abducting schoolgirls and violence against women and girls was really a core tool to undermine the counterinsurgent.
On the other hand, in Iraq, it was clear that violence against civilians or violence against women wasn’t moving the needle so much for the US government as was violence against American service members.
And so in Iraq, instead of allocating resources to violence against women and girls, what you found was that Al-Qaida was more allocating resources to developing better IED, which are improvised explosive devices technology, that would— those are the things that you would see blow up on the side of the road and then American, like, armored personnel carriers or tanks would just blow up. And so they invested in developing more of that technology because that was the sort of weakness, as it were, of the US government.
So that’s kind of the first part of the theory, that these insurgents begin to understand that for different types of counterinsurgent actors, the incentives are different. And then I think if gender is going to be a salient means of undermining the counterinsurgent, it will then happen through, I argue, these three mechanisms.
And the three mechanisms are, first, what I call information transmission suppression. And this kind of relies on the idea that, when you’re the counterinsurgent, you show up to a place, and you don’t know who the insurgents are. Everyone looks the same to you.
And this is true even in a place where— even in a domestic counterinsurgency. If you’re the Nigerian military, you largely come from the south, you’re now operating in the north. The norms are different. You don’t know the local kind of— sort of populations’, like, social structures.
You don’t know who’s in charge, who’s who. And this is what political scientists call the identification problem, which is show up, and you don’t know who the counterinsurgent– or who the insurgents are. And you need to get information on who the insurgents are from the local population.
And that, I argue, is a really important— that kind of information sharing between civilians and counterinsurgents is a really important part of doing counterinsurgency well. And so it’s in the insurgents interest to prevent that kind of information sharing between civilians and counterinsurgents.
And so I argue that targeting women is one way that they prevent this information sharing. And it happens kind of through two sort of pathways. One is that women actually have got really different and useful information. And this is something that I think wasn’t obvious at first. I think a lot of these places where— I studied these the cases of Somalia and Iraq and Nigeria, you think that, well, it’s a kind of patriarchal society so do these women, like, actually know anything. And are they actually sharing this information?
And in every case, actually, I found that not only do women have different information, but that they are sharing it with either the insurgents or the counterinsurgents. So that in stopping that, if you’re the insurgent, kind of, sharing process between the insurgent– the counterinsurgent, sorry, and the civilians is really important. And I argue that targeting women can be, like, one pathway to that.
The other part of the information transmission suppression mechanism is that targeting women can make the population in general feel unsafe and feel less likely to cooperate with counterinsurgents. And that kind of leads into the second mechanism, which I call the “emasculation mechanism,” which is that women are often cast by the counterinsurgent as this special class of civilian, that they’re special, they’re vulnerable, they need — particular innocent. They need, really– they need to be protected.
And that targeting women can actually be a means of emasculating the largely male counterinsurgent force. And then on top of that, it also– the emasculation can be both sort of internally felt by the counterinsurgents, but also really emasculating them publicly to show the civilian population that these counterinsurgents can’t really protect you because look, here we come. And we can, you know– you can’t even protect the most innocent of your civilians. You can’t even protect the women. So what good are you as a counterinsurgent?
And if your a civilian making the decision between supporting, either overtly or tacitly, the insurgent or the counterinsurgent, you’re sort of messaging to them that you’re not going to get good protection if you go with the counterinsurgent, so that you might as well kind of stick with the lesser of two evils, even if it means supporting the insurgent group.
So that’s the second mechanism that I propose. And then the third is this idea of bargaining leverage, which essentially we find most clearly in Nigeria, which is that gender-based targeting — or sex-selective targeting, as I call it — can actually be a means of extracting concessions — material concessions from the counter-insurgent, and that can actually lead to battlefield advantages for the insurgent group.
So in the case of Nigeria, they abducted these schoolgirls and the government was just desperate to get these schoolgirls back. And it’s not something that’s public, that the government hasn’t publicly acknowledged, so these are kind of different reports of what actually happened. But various reports suggest that the Nigerian government paid millions of euros to get a number of the schoolgirls back.
They released high-level Boko Haram commanders from jail in order to get the girls back. Obviously, these are really important strategic advantages for the group. And your adversary is basically just handing them to you. And so that is one way in which, really, that selective targeting can actually materially undermine the success of the counterinsurgency.
So those are the three mechanisms as I propose them. And then I argue that, in order for there to have been actual successful undermining, all three of the mechanisms need to have operated.
And kind of the point of the theory is that these mechanisms are more likely to bite if you’re a particular kind of counterinsurgent. And that’s why I look at three different actors, who are different types of counterinsurgents.
SIZEK: So I think we can really understand how insurgents can benefit from attacking women or abducting women. And one of the questions that I have is, how do these groups frame it for themselves? Or, what sorts of evidence do you have to understand how they’re thinking about it, in addition to how the counterinsurgents are thinking about this?
CHANDRA: Yeah, it’s so challenging because first of all, it’s hard to interview insurgents. And I should also note that this project was conducted entirely virtually because of the pandemic, but also because, leaving those sort of real — very real constraints aside, I personally think as a researcher that it’s very hard to take insurgents at face value, because when they are making public statements, they know that they are speaking to multiple audiences.
They are speaking to the intelligence agencies of basically every major government. They are speaking to the government of the country in which they’re operating. They’re speaking to the local population that they’re trying to convince to take a particular perspective.
They might be speaking to other insurgent groups if they have rivalries with other groups. So it’s these– in even internal documents, I think it’s really hard to say that, “oh, I found this on a document, and therefore, this is what the doctrine is and it’s for x, y, and z reason.”
So that was one thing that made this project really challenging. And I used a method, a qualitative method called “process tracing,” in which essentially, what you do is say, OK, as a researcher, I cannot observe the actual mechanism or the process that I am claiming occurred. But let’s say it did occur, what would be the traces of that mechanism or the empirical fingerprints that I could find that would suggest that, that mechanism did operate as I posited it? So there’s a lot of sort of thought experi– or thought ex– what’s the word? Thought–
SIZEK: Exercise? Or experiments?
CHANDRA: Yeah, exactly. Like, staring at the wall thinking, if this happened, and what would I be able to see? And then you go and look for those things.
And I’ll give you a really interesting example of why I think you can’t just take it at face value what they say. Because in 2012, I believe, just a couple of years prior to the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls in Nigeria, the Nigerian military/police had arrested some of the wives of Boko Haram commanders.
And Boko Haram, these commanders were very upset about it. And the leader of the group said something like, now see what happens to your women. And when explaining the kind of change that I pointed to between 2012 and 2014, where the attacks on abduction of — as abduction as a tactic really grew from half a percent to 14% roughly, I — people really, scholars really use that as a way to explain why that change happened, that, oh, these Boko Haram commanders wives had been abducted. And so this was a revenge. The Chibok abduction was revenge for the abduction, or the arresting of these wives.
And when I actually got into it and thought, OK, well, does that make sense? Even though the group is saying stuff like, oh, we’re going to take revenge on you, in their actions, is that exactly what I would expect to see if they were actually taking revenge?
And so I take issue with this, what I call the “revenge narrative,” because if you think about it, the timing is really far off, right? It’s two years later that they start doing abduction of schoolgirls. If you’re taking revenge, you wouldn’t think that they would wait two years to do so, right?
Then the other thing is that, they say their sort of threat was, “see what happens now to your women,” which would suggest sort of high-level military wives as opposed to schoolgirls. So I think you don’t really think like your women are some schoolgirls in a different part of the region.
And actually, as it turns out, they had abducted right around the time when they made the threat, some wives of local military commanders. And then they were— it’s unclear. Kind of, again, some of these things are not public, so there are different varying reports. It’s unclear whether the wives were eventually exchanged or not, but they did sort of follow through on the threat in a much more kind of immediate way.
And then the third thing that I think really calls into question, taking at face value what they’re saying, is if you think about this kind of revenge story, like, oh, we’re going to take revenge for you arresting our wives, there’s varying degrees of reporting on the preparedness of the group to actually perpetrate the Chibok abduction.
So some people say, they actually came to the school that night because they wanted to steal a brickmaker from the school. And they found the girls there, and they thought, again, because they’re insurgents, they, like, can throw things at the wall and see what sticks. They found the girls there, and they thought, oh, this would be good. Let’s just take the girls. And some of the girls themselves report that they didn’t— they came on motorcycles, and they had to call for big trucks to come when they realized there were this many girls unattended in the school. They had to call for big trucks to come.
So if you were actually– if you think about it, if the group were actually trying to perpetrate a mass abduction, I think they would know that the girls were there. They would know how many girls were there, and they would be prepared for— they wouldn’t have come on motorcycles. They would come on big trucks.
And so I think this is one sort of, like, a lesson of thinking about evidence in looking at what they do and what we would expect them to do if the theory that we were positing were correct.
Because if the revenge story were true, I don’t think this would have unfolded in the way that it did. And so that’s why I think it is really challenging. I look at different types of evidence. There are Human Rights Watch reports, Amnesty International reports, where they actually interview people on the ground was super helpful for me. That was good kind of firsthand accounting of what happened. I think also, you look at what the group says, other types of reporting, journalists who are on the ground, and then kind of coalesce it all together to see how you weight the evidence in different– different pieces of evidence based on the biases that might– that those pieces of evidence might bring.
But I think it is a very challenging question to approach. But I also think we have to be careful when we just say, like, the group said that they did it for this reason, therefore, they did it for this reason.
SIZEK: Yeah, I think you also point out that there are sort of, like, strategic, planned-ahead attacks on women, and that there are also just sort of, like, convenient moments where a bunch of Nigerian children appear and can be abducted, which also makes me curious about the sort of, like, convenience versus costliness of attacks against women, or perhaps abductions of women. So how, or in what ways is targeting women costly for insurgents or would not be in the benefit of insurgents? We’ve sort of covered the opposite direction, how they might benefit from it. But how is it not so great for them?
CHANDRA: Yeah, I think this is something that people do overlook quite frequently because again, I think there’s just this, out in the ether, this story that violence against women is just a part of war. But if you think about it, actually, violence against women can be quite costly to insurgent groups.
And that’s one of the reasons why I think it’s so important to study it, because it actually is quite puzzling when you think about it. And I identify three ways that violence against women is costly to the group.
The first is that it’s materially costly. And I look at forms of violence that are not just abduction. But if you think about abduction, right, if you think about what happened for Boko Haram right after they abducted these schoolgirls. And part of the challenge for the Nigerian government is that the schoolgirls’ abduction blew up into such a big international thing that the pressure became so high to get the girls back that it actually kind of encouraged the group to do more of that.
And I think that’s when I say that insurgents have the advantage to see what works. The initial abduction — and there are varying reports on the, like I said, the level of preparedness — so some people argue that they actually were prepared to abduct the girls that night, but they didn’t know that it was going to become such a big thing.
But they very quickly cottoned on to how valuable these girls were internationally, and how much pressure had been put on the Nigerian government and therefore, how much leverage they had, right, and gained in this way. And then, of course, that encourages kind of repetition of this behavior.
But if you’re also from the group’s perspective, you don’t know kind of what the tipping point is going to be, where the violence is going to start to gain so much attention from both the government or international organizations or whatever that it’s going to actually lead to your demise.
And so this– the kind of cost element of it, I think, is really important. And so the first way that I think about it is sort of the material cost. And if you look at the example of the schoolgirls, like a very basic-level thinking about logistics. You now have 270 schoolgirls. They’re not trained. They’re not– like, they’re not mobile. You have to carry them around on big trucks. They’re probably likely to run away. You have to feed them, clothe them, house them. It’s very difficult to move them.
And so from that sort of perspective of being, like, a nimble organization that you now have these schoolgirls, I think that’s really challenging.
But if you think more generally, not just about abduction, if you are, as an insurgent group, trying to select the target of your violence in particular ways, it means that there are certain indiscriminate tactics that you can’t use.
You have to be much more trained and much more disciplined. Like IEDs or whatever, you know, blowing up things are not going to work because you can’t guarantee who the victim of that attack is going to be, right?
So I think it eliminates a number of tactical options for insurgent groups to focus their attention and resources on attacks, like types of attacks that specifically target women. So I think that’s the sort of first thing is that it’s materially costly to the group in a number of ways.
It can also, like I said, cost the group on the battlefield. And a good example of this comes from Iraq, actually in Anbar province, where what the US government called the Anbar Awakening, which was– basically occurred when the US showed up to Anbar province, largely US soldiers, but of course, the sort of broader coalition in Iraq.
And it’s a largely– these are– it’s largely Sunni Iraqis living here, so there’s kind of a natural affiliation for Al-Qaeda. And, you know– so initially, the US is just not making a lot of progress because there’s kind of sectarian violence that’s unfolding. And in the beginning, the US kind of empowered the Shia Iraqis. And so I think there was just a lot of suspicion about the US and its motives and ability to protect the community.
And Al-Qaeda kind of took advantage of this, but then started to be really coercive towards the population, including forcibly marrying its fighters to girls in the community. And this was something that the community then started to take umbrage at. Like, how dare you come in and tell us like, who’s going to marry our girls? And this kind of overly coercive violence actually tipped the local community into supporting the US.
Then when they thought about it, they were like, well, the US is actually kind of the lesser of two evils, so we might as well support the US, even though there had been, prior, this kind of natural affinity to supporting the insurgent group.
And so one of the challenges is that, as the insurgent group, there are kind of– there’s a lot of research on the strategic benefits to insurgents of using violence against civilians to coerce them into cooperating and things like that.
But the challenge for the insurgent group is they don’t know what the straw is that’s going to break the camel’s back, right? They don’t know, like, this particular attack or this piece of violence or this thing is going to be a bridge too far and now all of a sudden, the entire civilian community is going to turn around and support the counterinsurgent.
So I think it can be quite costly. And violence against women is particularly, I think, visceral for people experientially. And so I think there’s a lot of kind of feelings that pop up in the community that they may not anticipate, and they don’t know that– what’s going to– when that is going–that tipping’s point is going to arrive and once it does, it’s really hard for the insurgent to kind of walk it back ,just because that violence is so visceral for the community to experience. So that’s another way in which it’s really costly.
And then the third thing is it’s really reputationally costly. Like, people don’t like violence against women. They don’t like– they don’t want to support groups that perpetrate violence against women. It’s not– it’s, like, horrific. It’s really– people have really strong reactions to it.
If you read stories about violence against women, I’ve read lots of horrible things that have happened to people in the course of doing this research. And it is really– like, it touches you very deeply. And so if you’re an insurgent group, and you’re thinking about needing to recruit from that population or have the population support you, even by not kind of ratting you out to the counterinsurgent, it can be really reputationally costly if the group is perpetrating just horrific levels of violence against— and really sort of like abhorrent types of violence against women and girls in the community.
So it is– I think we’ve talked about kind of the ways that it can be strategically beneficial in some ways to the group to attempt to invest in these kinds of tactics, but it is a really high-risk, high -eward strategy, I would say. There is definitely a downside. And that’s why it’s so interesting because you want to understand kind what are the conditions in which groups will make the investment and take on the costs of investing in these types of tactics.
[SIZEK] Yeah, so let’s talk a little bit about how these differences emerge or what the differences are that you tracked across the three different locations that you studied. So what does sort of the nature of the counterinsurgency have to do with whether or not targeting women is a good strategy for insurgents?
[CHANDRA] Yeah, so this is kind of the first part of the theory, I think I touched on this a little bit earlier, but essentially that the home population of the group — of the counterinsurgent actor, I should say is really important in kind of determining what will undermine them, what are the things that they’re going to start to say, like their electorate is going to start to say. Like, is this cost worth it, right?
And I think the other point that I want to make is that, the reason that I chose these three specific cases, in looking at all groups that were, at the time that I studied them, affiliated with Al-Qaeda – so Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Al-Shabab in Somalia – and Boko Haram in Nigeria, is that I think there’s a very strong tendency, particularly in the West, to assume that groups act a certain way — that these Islamist groups, specifically, act a certain way — because of their ideology.
Now, I’m not saying their ideology is not wildly patriarchal or sexist or problematic or even encourages violence against women. But what I find is that the ideology by itself does not explain the actions of the group. And that’s why I think it’s so interesting to look at these changes over the course of the conflict.
When you have the same actors with the same ideology making different decisions over time, I think it’s really important to kind of think about the context and what the strategic dynamics look like and what are the incentives that are being activated by what the counterinsurgent is doing.
And I think the kind of core part of the theory about why the counterinsurgent actor matters is really bringing counterinsurgents back into this. Because a lot of the research has really focused on, what is happening for the group that it’s making these decisions, and almost thinking about it in a vacuum as like they’re just deciding based on x, y, and z factors, what kinds of tactics to invest in.
And what I’m saying is, this is a dynamic between counterinsurgent and insurgent. And so what the counterinsurgent is doing, who they are, what they value really matters for how the insurgent will respond when the counterinsurgency really ramps up.
And so in terms of, why does the counterinsurgent actor matter? Because if you’re a domestic counterinsurgent, the sort of home audience to whom you are responsive as a government, who people who are funding you, the government that’s backing you, they expect that you are going to protect civilians.
They expect that you’re going to do everything you need to do to prevent this kind of harm from coming to civilians within your own borders. On the other hand, if you’re the US in Iraq, you may not have those expectations as clearly.
And I think that’s where I found that polling information so interesting, that people found— had a very high awareness— Americans in general, had very high awareness of how many civilians, sorry, how many service members had died, but not how many Iraqi civilians had died. They vastly underestimated how many Iraqi civilians had died in Iraq based on US operations there.
And so it just wasn’t– this is not to say that people didn’t care. Obviously, there were a lot of many different protests and different thoughts around the Iraq war at various different points. But in general, the American electorate did not use civilian death as a means of tracking whether the US government was succeeding in Iraq. What they used instead was how many American soldiers are dying in Iraq.
And if too many soldiers are dying in Iraq, then we have to ask ourselves, is this cost worth what we’re paying for it? And again, I think that’s where insurgents are smart, and they learned that these particular— these are the particular soft spots and weak points for the counterinsurgent. And can I– can we develop or invest in technologies that really expose those weaknesses?
[SIZEK] And so how does this work at the regional level? Because I know that we haven’t talked that much about Somalia. But what about the third case, and how does this sort of play in relation to this international counterinsurgent versus the national level counterinsurgent?
[CHANDRA] Yeah, Somalia is such an interesting case because it’s a case of a regional counterinsurgent. So it’s not like what I call an Iraq completely foreign counterinsurgent where the US shows up. Most vast numbers of US soldiers do not speak Arabic. They cannot communicate. They’re using locals for in translation. And there’s just no understanding of regional local norms at all, to the point where, in fact, a lot of folks thought that the violence that was occurring into what became just vast amounts of sectarian violence, that they thought it was normal. They just thought this is, like, what it is to be in Iraqi society.
So I think what’s so interesting about Somalia is that you have regional– a regional counterinsurgence made up of kind like neighboring states of Somalia. And so they have kind of more awareness of local norms and kind of, like, what is normal. And I think what I find there is that it’s kind of in the middle of the domestic counterinsurgent and the foreign counterinsurgent.
That in Iraq, the only mechanism that I found evidence for in accordance with the theory, was the information transmission suppression, because I find that women always have information, and they always are sharing it with counterinsurgents.
That is true basically no matter how patriarchal, how repressive the insurgent group, the society. It’s a way in which women have a lot of agency that we don’t actually kind of consider them having agency.
But in Somalia, I find that, in addition to information transmission suppression, the emasculation mechanism did operate, because civilians did start to express qualms about the efficacy of AMISOM’s operations, based on the increase and sort of change in the tactics that Al-Shabab perpetrated when AMISOM kind of ramped up its counterinsurgency operations.
So I find that there was more, you know, more sort of effect, and the kind of more effort on the part of the insurgent group in that case to try to undermine the counterinsurgent based– using sex-selective targeting. But it didn’t quite rise to the level of success of what we saw in Nigeria where, like I said, they were just able to extract millions of euros and actually get fighters released from jail, based on their sex-selective targeting.
So I think it kind of shows this interesting case of, it’s– the international kind of regional counterinsurgents have a strong interest in preventing civilian violence, also because it tends to spill over into their own borders. Whereas to be honest, there wasn’t a risk of spillover violence from Iraq into California, right? It wasn’t a thing that we worried about. Like, we’re doing this thing here and if we don’t do it well, then that means the US borders are less secure.
Whereas in Somalia, there was– the stakes were higher, if you’re a regional neighbor, to make sure that you’re doing counterinsurgency well. But it didn’t rise to the level of expectation of really preventing widespread violence against women. And I think it’s an interesting case because as kind of the US– you saw the US withdraw from Afghanistan, kind of– we’ll see what happens in the next election and see where sort of– how US policy develops.
But in general, I think there’s this kind of withdrawal of the US from these large-scale operations and kind of long-term missions and operations of military bases and just, like, thousands of soldiers indefinitely conducting counterinsurgency operations. And as that happens, I think you will see a shift towards empowering more these regional kinds of organizations like AMISOM or things like that.
And so I think it’s really important– it was an important case because as that sort of becomes, I think, more likely the way that the US, it will, instead of doing it itself, may fund or support or send support and training to these more regional organizations. I think it’s important to understand kind of how the incentives are operating in those cases as well. So it was a really interesting case study from that perspective.
[SIZEK] Yeah, so this brings us to perhaps our final question, which is obviously one of the goals of research like this is to try to prevent or reduce gender-based violence. What do you think your research can bring as a policy solution or as a strategy to try to reduce these harmful effects of sex-selective targeting?
[CHANDRA] Yeah, such a great question. I mean, that’s something that really motivated me every day when I was doing the research. And I think it would be a few things. One is that, again, I think there’s really this tendency to think that ideology explains a lot more than it does in these cases.
And again, that’s not to say that the ideology is not important. It’s just something I consider more as a background factor. And so I think understanding the context, and the kind of strategic dynamics on the ground and understanding these as conflict dynamics and decisions that are made in response to actions by counterinsurgents, I think is really important. I think that’s an important lesson from this research.
I think the other thing is, it really opens up avenues for future research, as well. Like, one of the things I think this kind of lays the groundwork for is thinking about whether there are discernible patterns that we could learn about or learn from when groups choose particular types of violence over others.
So I think when you say violence against women, most often people assume that you’re talking about sexual violence. So I think the other thing that I’ve done is really move beyond just sexual violence to looking at non-sexual, physical violence, abduction, things like that, kidnapping— that we hadn’t really studied in depth as a field too much yet. And I think it’s good. Lots of people are starting to do that work, which is really exciting for me as someone who’s in that space.
But I think there’s a lot of work still to be done, like thinking some groups, for example, the Taliban, which is a case I don’t study. But the original Taliban in Afghanistan, they did a lot of physical violence. They were really repressive, as people might remember if you were thinking about the very early days of the Afghanistan, war in Afghanistan.
But they didn’t do rape. They just were not– people would say like, oh, we leave our doors open. They’re not dangerous from a sexual violence. No one one’s going to come in into your house and, like, steal your kid or your daughter and, like, rape her.
And it was similar to Al-Shabab in the beginning, too, that they were incredibly repressive. I mean, there are these stories of– you know, there’s one story that really stuck with me of a woman who, her two-year-old ran out the door of her house. And so she ran after the two-year-old, of course, into the street. And she did not stop because, of course, her child had run into the street. She did not stop to put on her abaya. And Al-Shabab captured her and said– punished her pretty harshly for not having her abaya on, even though she had been running after her child who had run into the street.
And so there was a lot of non-sexual physical violence that they would perpetrate in punishment for having broken these rules, but they didn’t do sexual violence. So I think this– one avenue for future research is just thinking, what– why do some groups select into particular forms of targeting over others, and what can we learn from those patterns? So I think that’s another– it kind of lays the groundwork for future research.
But I from a policy perspective, the most important lesson is we think about these kind of contemporary theories of counterinsurgency as just cookie cutter in some ways, that you can apply it anywhere.
And I think there was a lot of work that went into developing the kind of hearts and minds and the kind of doctrine that the US eventually shifted to during the Iraq War. And it’s clear from this research that who the counterinsurgent is really matters, and that doing counterinsurgency in particular ways can actually increase incentives for targeting women.
So I think learning from this that you can’t just– if you’re the West, and you’re moving away from doing counterinsurgency yourself towards training and equipping or things like that, I think understanding the context of what’s happening, who the actors are, and how the particular behavior that we’re advocating — or the particular sort of operational approach that we’re advocating — can actually change the incentives for different types of behaviors in response is really important.
So not just going to places and saying, do it this way, but really thinking about, what is the context, what are the different incentives, and what are the conflict dynamics that are occurring here?
[SIZEK] Well, thank you so much for telling us about your research and learning more about the intersection of gender and international security.
[CHANDRA] Thank you so much for having me.
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[WOMAN’S VOICE] Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
