Beyond the Barbed Wire: Conflict-Related Violence Against Women (CRVAW) Perpetrated by State Actors in the Northern Irish and southern United States Borderlands

Physical borders are sites of engagement and collaboration, of conflict and exclusion. The rapid militarization of borders in the Western world warrants an interrogation of how those policy and infrastructural changes impact the lives of the individuals living in the borderlands. This thesis examines the impact of border militarization through the lens of conflict-related violence against women (CRVAW) in two different sites: Northern Ireland between the years of 1985 and 1995 and the southwestern United States between 1995 and 2005. Previous scholarship of Northern Ireland has examined violence against women during the Troubles (1969-1998) but has not focused specifically on the borderlands; previous scholarship of the U.S.-Mexico border has examined violence against women but not through the lens of CRVAW. Theories of gender-based violence during conflict have predominantly focused on strategic mass rape, a feature that is not present in either of these conflicts. CRVAW distinguishes itself from those theories by expanding our understanding of how women experience harm during conflict to include acts beyond just sexualized violence. Using twelve individual accounts of CRVAW, six from each site, this thesis examines forms of harm that surfaced within the infrastructure of the border and their relationship with the greater conflict being waged by the state. In each site, the “enemy” group presented a distinct threat to the state at the physical border. Through a comparison of sites, this thesis identifies underlying similarities in constructions of the “enemy” group, Irish-Catholic and nationalist or republican women in Northern Ireland and Latino women in the U.S., and how that manifested in border infrastructure and mapped onto acts of CRVAW. Points of departure in the comparison, like geographic differences, presence of migration, and conflict phase under examination, are highlighted for further research.