Women in War: The Micro-Processes of Mobilization in El Salvador by Jocelyn Viterna (review)

Noting that 30 percent of the guerrilla combatants who demobilized at the end of El Salvador’s civil war were women, Viterna seeks to answer various questions about their experiences, including but not limited to why they became guerrillas, their experiences as guerrillas, and the outcomes or consequences of their participation. Viterna claims that extant research on El Salvador’s women guerrillas has tended to overgeneralize them, viewing them through macro- and meso-level frameworks that she believes obscure the lived reality and subjective experiences of those women as individuals. Consequently, she insists that we lack an accurate understanding of why these women did what they did. It is for this reason that Viterna employs a micro- or individual-level analysis, which places subjective identity and personal narration at the forefront. She accomplishes her analytical goal by relying on interviews as her main body of evidence.

Viterna spent more than two years in El Salvador conducting roughly 230 formal interviews with former guerrillas. It is by relying on interviews that Viterna overcomes one of the main hurdles that confront scholars of El Salvador’s civil war, namely a lack of documentation from both sides of the conflict. Viterna says that she went into her research with some expectations and hypotheses, but that as her interviews accumulated and as she engaged with the transcripts repeatedly, distinct patterns emerged that led her to unexpected conclusions.

One of those findings relates to how former combatants have fared in the postwar era. As she puts it, “As I passed through my interviews again, the pattern became clear: women who did well after the war were those who had occupied particular network locations during the war” (9). In other words, it was not necessarily the most ideological, combative, or feminist women who ended up playing leadership roles after the war, but rather those who were in the right place at the right time, or who were linked, by chance, to particularly relevant sociopolitical networks during the war. In this regard, Viterna predicts similar findings by subsequent scholars such as Ralph Sprenkels.

Among many other insightful findings, Viterna claims that the gender-bending participation of women as guerrillas actually reinforced rather than eroded El Salvador’s gendered hierarchy. This ironic discovery, she says, goes a long way toward explaining why women have made relatively modest gains in the postwar era.

My only complaint about this study revolves around the way Viterna occasionally uses evidence to build her narrative. She does not always employ a critical analysis when presenting her informants’ claims. If they say something happened, she sometimes narrates it as if it had. Similarly, on one occasion she dismisses secondary scholarship (152) that contends that women guerrillas were subjected to sexual harassment from their male counterparts, because her informants reject such claims. But Viterna does not disprove the evidence in that scholarship, nor does she address other primary evidence that supports the accusation, such as testimonials by former female guerrillas in the 1997 compilation Y la montaña habló. But these are minor criticisms of a sound and impressive study.

In her introduction, Viterna says that her findings have value for scholars of social movements, political violence, and gender. I agree. Viterna’s book makes wide-ranging and original contributions. It is part of a new wave of scholarship on El Salvador’s civil war, and with its 2015 publication date, this study will be an often-cited cornerstone in the field for many years to come. It has informed my own research, and I have also used it with undergraduates, who have found it clearly written, well organized, and thus comprehensible. In short, it is a very good book.