Patriarchal camouflage: women's military experiences and the 1992-1995 Bosnian War

Abstract

With the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995, women who joined the different army ranks, enlisting in their thousands and occupying diverse roles, were first in line for demobilisation, and their stories remained undocumented. The erasure of their experiences from the historiography of the war has had profound epistemological ramifications in shaping the post-war memorialisation landscape in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this doctoral research project, I set out to document and analyse their life histories to co-construct with them a critical feminist historiography of the war. I develop Cynthia Enloe's concept of ‘patriarchal confusion’ into ‘patriarchal camouflage’, departing from Enloe's framing to examine the deliberate strategies through which militarised patriarchal institutions disguise short-term military goals as a reformed gender order while temporarily integrating women for war-waging purposes. I employ a combination of methods, which include archival research, oral history, and collage-making, to render visible the complexity of women war veterans' experiences, explore the factors that led them to join the military, their experiences within military structures, and the images and conceptualisation of gender that were constructed, reproduced, and resisted in this context. My findings challenge dominant narratives of military inclusion as empowerment, revealing that women join military ranks for survival and strategic reasons, exercise agency through ambiguity, and face systematic post-war erasure and devaluation that reduce them to symbolic roles. The research demonstrates that patriarchal camouflage operates through women's strategic navigation of gendered expectations, military institutions' management of gendered contradictions, and societies' silencing of women veterans. My work positions the situated knowledges of Bosnian women veterans, who have been largely overlooked in feminist literature on Bosnia and Herzegovina, as critical tools for further theorizing and developing interdisciplinary frameworks for conversations about gender, militarism, and war, and for reimagining Bosnian past/present/futures.