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Individual Motivations

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Women and the Lebanese Civil War

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Abstract

In this chapter, Jennifer Philippa Eggert shows that the most important factors leading to women’s participation during the Lebanese civil war were individual motivations and the women’s insistence to be fully involved in the militias. Without the women’s insistence for their inclusion, it is highly unlikely that there would have been female fighters in any of the militias during the Lebanese civil war. This chapter discusses the background of the women (and men) who joined the militias and discusses whether gender-specific motivations to join a militia existed. It highlights the ways in which the security context, organisational characteristics and societal factors influenced women’s (and men’s) motivations to participate in the war. The chapter questions widespread assumptions about women and political violence—in Lebanon and beyond.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The question of how feminism and nationalism interact in the case of women’s participation in non-violent political movements in the region has been discussed by, amongst others, Al-Ali (2000), Al-Ali and Taṣ (2018), Arenfeldt (2012), Fleischmann (2003), Hasso (2005), Khairallah (1996), Pratt and Al-Ali (2011).

  2. 2.

    This was the situation at the beginning of the war. Later, many Christian militia members also fought for an independent Christian homeland (Sneifer 2006, p. 129).

  3. 3.

    Only one described the mobilisation at the time as influenced by propaganda (interviewee 59).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, Warwickshire, UK

    Jennifer Philippa Eggert

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Correspondence to Jennifer Philippa Eggert .

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Eggert, J.P. (2022). Individual Motivations. In: Women and the Lebanese Civil War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83788-4_3

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