Abstract/Summary

This thesis is an interdisciplinary analysis of women’s lives in war in Tigray, Ethiopia. Through thirty-nine original oral history interviews, it argues that women’s gender identities and roles have been redesigned through their consuming participation in war over the past fifty years. It disrupts artificial distinctions between periods of war and post-war for Tigrayan women, demonstrating that their lived experiences reveal a gendered continuum of violence, peaking and troughing, but ever-present in women’s personal lives. Through critical analysis of memory, it unpacks the temporality and spatiality of women’s experiences of war, foregrounding their diverse participation from beyond the battlefield to challenge the emphasis in conflict studies on armed actors. It argues that by paying emphatic attention to women’s engagement in war from ‘peripheral’ spaces – in non-armed roles, as militarised civilians, as refugees and diaspora activists – we can radically rethink the concept of a digital warscape in contemporary conflicts. Drawing on art, poetry, songs and alternative archival sources from humanitarian actors alongside new oral histories, this research explores how women frame love and joy as political work, choosing to perform feminine articulations of resistance and, critically, self-identifying as participants in war despite non-combatant status. It maps the dynamic roles women have occupied in conflict in Tigray, addressing the pervasive sidelining of women’s voices in collective discourse by centring non-exceptional women’s experiences and memories. This thesis bridges the 1974-1991 civil war in Ethiopia and the 2020-2022 Tigray War to methodologically disrupt discrete analysis of the interrelated conflicts in women’s lives. It offers an intervention in the masculine-coded field of war studies through feminist oral history practice, unpacking layers of memory in women’s narration of past violence through the lens of the present. This approach allows this thesis to offer an original perspective on the legitimation of women’s engagement in war, examining the legacies of maternal militancy in Tigray alongside the reconstruction of binary conflict roles in public memory. It explores intergenerational solidarities between Tigrayan women negotiating their positions in war, and how cultural constructions of age and ethnicity are given meaning through conflict engagement. Ultimately, this thesis reorients the narrative of war in Tigray to actively prioritise women’s voices, contributions, memories, emotions, and complex identities. In doing so, it argues that their existence is not contiguous to the history of conflict in the region, but an essential aspect of every facet of it.