The Intimate Insurgency: Women's Maneuvering of the Bangsamoro Conflict in the Philippines

This dissertation explores what it means for women to live intimately with a violent, political conflict in the context of Muslim separatism in the Philippines. The study is based on 15 months of fieldwork between 2014 and 2018 in the settings of Mindanao, Manila and Palawan.The study argues that the women’s possibilities, aspirations and capacities for action are shaped by the intimate entanglements of conflict, insurgency and kinship politics. Through analysis of the relational and gendered conditions, norms and commitments that the women fulfill, bargain and contest in various ways, the study provides insights into the creative, contradictory, and composite forms of agency through which they deal with and make a life possible within conflict and patriarchal familial structures. The dissertation makes a contribution to feminist international relations scholarship by suggesting new understandings of women’s agency in contexts violent conflict and of conflict itself. The overall argument is that to understand a long-term violent conflict, we need to pay attention to how it exists within a continuum of violences, is institutionalized and a structuring force in the lives of women.