Role of Women in National Conflicts. The Cases of Kashmir and Mindanao (PDF)

Essay from the year 2021 in the subject Ethnology / Cultural Anthropology, grade: 1,0, University of Copenhagen, course: South Asia: Reason and Religion, language: English, abstract: This paper connects the topic of feminist identity with national conflicts and compares two regions in Asia with current nationalistic tendencies. The paper focuses on the regions of Kashmir in Northern India and Mindanao in the Southern Philippines. This seemed appropriate, as both regions share a range of commonalities concerning their specific (post-)colonial development. The paper will investigate common - but also diverging - aspects by focusing on the Hindu / Christian 'self' and the Muslim 'other', the forced annexation by the state and the major political changes from the 2000s.

As a second step, the author decided to focus on the role of Muslim women in the conflict situations in Kashmir and Mindanao. While exploring female agency in religio-political movements in India during the course, this essay wanted to find out about its counterpart in the Philippines. In this regard, the guiding questions were: What different forms of female agency can be found in Kashmir and Mindanao?

How can Muslim women articulate their activism within a male dominated society? What are the prerequisites in order to enable emancipatory female activism in a conflict area? And what influence do Modi's and Duterte's hyper-masculine politics have on female agency? These questions will be approached by analysing the ethnographic research conducted in Kashmir and Mindanao.