Militarization in Sudan, South Sudan, and Eritrea presents women with a cruel paradox: it creates spaces for empowerment while systematically reinforcing their oppression. This research exposes how women's participation in liberation struggles—often celebrated as revolutionary—fails to translate into lasting equality when the guns fall silent.
Through interviews with activists, experts and displaced women, the study documents how Eritrea's female combatants shattered gender norms during liberation, just to face stigma and exclusion afterwards; how Sudanese women bear the brunt of sexual violence and forced marriages while being erased from peace talks; and how all three nations transform women's bodies into battlegrounds while diverting resources from healthcare to weapons.
The findings reveal militarization as more than war - it's a profitable political marketplace where violence becomes currency and gender oppression serves as collateral damage. By comparing these three cases, the research dismantles the myth that battlefield equality leads to lasting empowerment, showing instead how militarized states systematically dismantle women's political gains during transitions.
Far from abstract theory, these testimonies and data points expose how the very systems touted as protecting nations actually devastate women's lives - first by making them targets during war, then by excluding them from decision-making during peace.
The path forward demands radical reimagining: policies must center gender justice by addressing the socioeconomic roots of conflict rather than criminalizing dissent; peace processes need feminist frameworks that tackle historical grievances; and media must challenge militarized masculinities that normalize violence. As the research shows, only by dismantling these interconnected systems of oppression - through feminist foreign policies, trauma-informed institutions, and community-led alternatives to militarized security - can we break the cycle that has long sacrificed women's bodies and freedoms at the altar of state power.
The testimonies collected here, despite the silencing mechanisms of fear that shadows over communities at home and beyond, don't just document harm - they light the way toward a future where security means care, not control; where peacebuilding prioritizes justice over power-sharing; and where women's wartime courage finally translates into lasting political emancipation
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