Guerilla and feminism

In her novel The Shadow King Ethiopian Maaza Mengiste portrays the role that female soldiers played in the war between Ethiopia and Italy and what it was like to be a woman during that war. American Nimmi Gowrinathan, who has a Sri Lankan heritage, has researched female guerrilla fighters for two decades. Her book Radicalizing her appeared in 2022, and in it was what is possibly a surprising statistic: women make up 30% of the guerrilla fighters in the world. According to Nimmi Gowrinathan, these women have been misunderstood, and she points to her research on women in Sri Lanka, Eritrea, Syria and Colombia over the past 20 years.

Mengiste and Gowrinathan engage in a conversation with Norwegian law and human rights expert Cecilie Hellestveit about gender, power and war, and why women choose violence.