Bibliography: leaves 290-311. This study investigates the roles and experiences of "women warriors" in Zimbabwe's anti-colonial national liberation war, and reveals certain glorifications which have served to obscure and silence the voices of thousands of young girls and women involved in the struggle. The problems associated with the inclusion of women in an armed/military guerrilla force are discussed, and the (re)presentation of women in discourses of war, fictional accounts, public and national symbols and other multiple discursive layers which have re-inscribed the women back into the domestic examined. The Zimbabwean film Flame highlights the political sensitivity of the issues, including accusations of rape by male comrades in guerrilla training camps. An overview of women's involvement in Zimbabwean history, anti-colonial struggle, and the African nationalist movement provides the background for a critique of western feminist theories of nationalism and women's liberation in Africa. Historical records are juxtaposed with the voices of some women ex-combatants who speak their reasons for joining the struggle and their experiences of war. White Rhodesian women's roles are also examined in light of the gendered constructions of war.

Master of Arts / Department of English / Gregory J. Eiselein / In her collection of poems The War Works Hard (2005), Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail presents her readers with unembellished insight into the Iraqi war from a woman's perspective. This perspective is rarely voiced in Iraqi war literature which is dominated by male writers concerned with men's heroism at the battle front and boundless patriotism. At the same time, these male authors rarely depict Iraqi women's experiences of war beyond the battle grounds. Even when women are present in such literature, they often share their men's point of view on war and voice only their acceptance of it. Mikhail, however, contemplates a counter narrative to this stereotypical female role by presenting women who protest war and the destruction it causes. Her poems portray mothers, lovers, sisters and daughters who protest war's brutality and injustice. Some of the women in Mikhail's poems protest war by directly or indirectly criticizing its institutions and condemning the leaders who promote it. While other women in her work find that their protest lies in their de-fragmentation of the destruction and loss caused by war, thus refusing its power over them and their loved ones. Yet, the most important form of women's protest of war in Mikhail's work is recollection. Through the recollection of their fragmented memories and lives, Mikhail's women manage to survive and find a spark of optimism in the darkness that war has unleashed. Their survival and their ability to re-establish their lives apart from war and the presence of men constitutes a powerful and dramatic protest of war's control over their lives.

In this dissertation, I map the experimental margin of Algerian cinema between 1965 and 1979 against the paradigmatic film about Algeria, Gillo Pontecorvo and Yacef Saadi’s The Battle of Algiers (1965). I focus on the period immediately following the successful conclusion of an eight-year war waged by the Algerian National Liberation Front against France. It is known as the “Golden Age” of Algerian cinema, a span of nearly fifteen years after the film industry was nationalized when culture was generously financed by newly exploited petrochemical resources in the Sahara. This mapping has two aims, the first of which is straightforward: I read four films made in Algeria by Algerian filmmakers closely in light of their socio-political contexts and I argue that together they represent a significant and overlooked minor history in Algerian film. The films are Tahia Ya Didou! by Mohamed Zinet (1969), Omar Gatlato by Merzack Allouache (1976), La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua by Assia Djebar (1976), and Nahla by Farouk Beloufa (1979). They are significant formally and in terms of their critical reception at the time and since the late 1960s and early 1970s among Algerian filmmakers, but they are crucially significant as ambivalent testimony about life after the colonial period and about the traumatic effect of the long and violent struggle for liberation. Second, I read these films against the Battle of Algiers in its socio-political context. I argue that the aspects of the War of Liberation that fall out of this canonical portrait of decolonial resistance are precisely those taken up by the experimental margin I examine elsewhere in the dissertation. My reading of Pontecorvo and Saadi’s classic film is critical not only in terms of its representation of violence perpetrated by the French but also in the aspects of Algerian history it occludes, namely the history of women. If the margin provides a space for testimony for the trauma of the war, the Battle of Algiers reifies a Fanonian understanding of revolutionary violence, an understanding that is constitutively exclusive of women’s role in the war. I read extensively with Karima Lazali on the clinical situation of Algerians post-war. I draw on archival materials from Algeria and France including production notes and documentation of contemporary reception, especially by Algerians. On contextual questions, I read Algerian sociologists, politicians, filmmakers, and film critics as much as possible. My commitment to de-centering especially a French perspective on Algeria allows the rich semiotic exchange between filmmakers, artists, architects, and political activists to emerge and to challenge the hegemonic perspective that Algerian culture post-war was entirely dominated by its authoritarian government.

Since the end of the Nigcria-Biafra war in 1970, political and social theorists, journalists, and scholars have discussed the significance of the war and the major players. Yet one perspective is often omitted, and that is the experiences of women and the roles they played during the war. This thesis begins to unearth some of those hidden narratives through the use of in-depth interviews with seven Biafran women who lived during and survived the Nigeria-Biafra war. Their stories about the importance of their ethnic and religious identities, their roles and experiences during the war, their encounters with death and refugees, and their discussions of a generational shift are important parts of some of the unearthed narratives.

This thesis explores the conditions under which mass rapes are more likely to be incorporated into the strategy of military or paramilitary groups during periods of conflict. I examine three societies, Rwanda , the former Yugoslavia , and Cambodia in a comparative analysis. To determine what characteristics make societies more likely to engage in rape as a military tool, I look at the status of women in the society, the religious cultures, the degree of female integration into the military institutions, the cause of the conflicts, the history of the conflict, and finally, the status of minority ethnic groups in each of these societies.

Dissertation is presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Masters Degree of Technology: Fine Art, Durban University of Technology, 2009. / This dissertation was researched in two main parts. The first enquiry was to establish whether the Afrikaner women practised any form of craft during their time of interment in the Anglo-Boer War concentration camps, during 1899-1902. The second part explores the appropriation of craft within the Post-Modern context by five South African artists. During this research into the craft practises of Afrikaner women in the concentration camps, I discovered that this particular issue has not been satisfactorily documented. The reasons for this are directly connected to the patriarchal system of the Calvinist Afrikaner. The impact which this system had on the craft practices of Afrikaner women and the lack of documentation thereof, are discussed. The paucity of information on Afrikaner women‟s history led to primary research where I gained the information I needed from the descendents of interned women. The findings of this research includes various forms of needlecraft such as embroidery, quilting, crocheting, and dress and bonnet making. Amongst the artefacts found were two ceramic dogs made in the camp. Various forms of tin and wire artefacts were also found. The contribution to the impoverished Afrikaner women by Hobhouse, the South African Agricultural Association and the South African Women‟s Federation is explained in relation to this dissertation. The freedom that Post-Modern thought created amongst artists enabled them to explore exciting ways of executing their art. The five South African artists whose work I chose to explore are Billy Zangewa, Sue Pam-Grant, Gina Waldman, Antionette Murdoch and Nirmi Ziegler. Their art practices are varied but the common denominator is the incorporation of various forms of traditional feminine craft into their work. They subvert the patriarchal order, draw attention to land issues, explore women‟s fragility and raise awareness concerning the abuse of the environment. I conducted an interview with Ziegler and relied on written documentation for the research concerning the other artists. I also made use of my own analysis and instinct as a woman and mother to interpret some works. As an Afrikaner woman I execute my work by using traditional feminine craft and specific motives found during my research. I deliver commentary on the lack of vi documentation of all of Afrikaner women‟s history. I use myself as an example of an Afrikaner woman and document my own history within the greater Afrikaner history which is contained and embedded within the history of South Africa. My research into and documentation of the craft practises of Afrikaner women during and directly after the Anglo-Boer War adds to the body of knowledge concerning the history of Afrikaner women. The same applies to the work of the five artists I explored. The diversity of material, concept and execution of their work will add some knowledge to the existing body of knowledge about their work, but more so to the documentation of women's history. / M

The increasingly universal information society has required also the Swedish Armed Forces to participate in the information flow, for example by publishing images from its operations in an open digital image archive. With use of the image archive’s photographs from the Swedish Armed Forces’ military operations in Afghanistan in 2011 and 2012, the study seeks to examine the way in which the Swedish army depicts its involvement in the region. From a postcolonial perspective, based on Edward Said’s notions on Orientalism, this semiotic analysis examines the image publications in order to reveal what messages the images convey. How are Afghan women respectively Afghan men depicted in contrast to Swedish soldiers? How are Swedish soldiers portrayed in relation to their Afghan military allies? Such are the questions at hand. The study makes use of a methodological framework based on Roland Barthes and Charles Saunders Pierce and looks to reveal the denotative and connotative meanings in the image material. The result of the study shows a depiction of the military intervention in Afghanistan that largely portrays Afghan women and girls in need of saving and emancipation, while Swedish soldiers are ascribed the role of the hero. Moreover, images depicting Swedish soldiers as modern, powerful and progressive in contrast to weak and underdeveloped Afghan men are also recurrent in the material. The cooperation between the Swedish military and its Afghan allies is throughout the material depicted in a positive manner, and symbolic gestures of friendship between the two frequent the image publications. At large, a positive perspective permeates the Swedish military’s depiction of its operations in Afghanistan, and its soldiers are portrayed as powerful bringers of Western liberty and equality. Meanwhile, the East is depicted as all that the West is not: uncivilised, weak and infantile.

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<p>This dissertation presents an ethnography of youth in Liberia and of how their lives became affected by a civil war which raged in the country between 1990 and 1997. The focus is on the experiences, motivations, and reflections of young combatants who fought for a variety of rebel factions. For these young people, the daily prospect of poverty, joblessness and marginalisation effectively blocked the paths to a normal adulthood; drawing them instead into a subculture of liminality, characterised by abjection, resentment and rootlessness. As opportunity came, their voluntary enlistment into one of the several rebel armies of the civil war therefore became an attractive option for many. Based upon one year of fieldwork during 1998, conducted among groups of ex-combatant youths in both the capital Monrovia and in a provincial town in the rural hinterland, I describe and analyse the young people’s own accounts of their involvement in the civil war; their complicity in atrocities, their coping strategies in the context of armed conflict, their position as ex-combatants in a post-war environment, and their outlook on their past, present and future.</p><p>In the first chapter I set the scene of the Liberian civil war and discuss the central concepts on which my dissertation is built. Chapter two then takes up the methodological issues relating to the particular fieldwork conditions found. This is done by providing an account of my participant observation within a volatile community of ex-combatants in Monrovia. Chapter three deals with the nature of pre-civil war Liberian political and military organisational structures and their rootedness in pre-state institutions such as local warlordism and secret societies. In chapter four I look at the cultural setting of my fieldwork and track elements found within the legacy of violence, to oral literature and patterns of socialisation. Chapter five focuses specifically on the role and predicament of young women in the civil war. Whilst some became active fighters, most participated as auxiliaries in various capacities. Their accounts convey not only the tremendous hardship and suffering, but also reveal mechanisms which helped at least some to survive. In chapter six I discuss the question of a post-war reintegration of ex-combatants into peacetime society and show that the prospects of different groups depend primarily on their social and geographical situation, rather than on the negligible effectiveness of aid programmes routinely executed by international organisations and NGOs.</p>

Texte repris d'une thèse de doctorat publiée en 1996 : "Brave women and fair men" : women advocates of U.S. intervention in World War II, 1939-1941 : Thèse de doctorat : Histoire contemporaine : Université de Washington : 1996. / Bibliogr. p. [221]-226. Index.