To fight with words instead of guns: Reincorporation, subjection and political agency in the case of women ex-combatants of the Farc-EP

Abstract: This thesis investigates the social position and political agency of women excombatants of the Farc-EP who laid down their arms after the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Farc-EP. I show how, through the laying down of arms and reincorporation, women ex-combatants come to occupy a specific social position under historical and global power relations and intersecting forms of social inequality. Moreover, I argue that from their subject position, they act as the agents of reincorporation and shape the implementation of the peace agreement and society in general. My research is a case study based on twenty-one qualitative interviews with women ex-combatants of the Farc-EP in two reincorporation zones in Colombia and contributes to the literature on women in disarmament, demobilization and reintegration processes. By situating my analysis in my interviewees’ standpoint, I redirect the gaze from women ex-combatants as the deviant others in need of reintegration to a problematization of the social order in place, and to the ways in which women excombatants challenge this order. I shed light on the workings of political and economic power structures without claiming that women’s experiences within these structures are essentially different from those of male ex-combatants or detached from the myriad struggles of people at the margins of Colombian society.