The FPCD and The Guerrera Book Project Formally Join Efforts

The FPCD and the Guerrera Book Project Formally Join Efforts

The Guerrera Book Project aims to amplify the individual and collective voices of Guerreras: women who have taken up arms for a cause. These women tend to be underrepresented and underserved by reconciliation and development intervention programs, and may have lost or jeopardized their social safety net as a result of breaching strict local gender roles. From El Salvador to Vietnam, from East Timor to Senegal, women have played critical roles in armed struggles for social justice.


The purpose of this multi-year, multi-country project is to empower women in conflict and post conflict situations and to assist them in claiming due recognition and recompense for their contributions and sacrifices.


(Photo from left to right: Guerrera Project Co-Directors Julie Klinger and Emma Gaalaas Mullaney discuss issues with FPCD Executive Director Claudia Abate, at the residence of President Jose Ramos-Horta, Dili, Timor-Leste, January 2009)

Building upon inspiring existing research on women as leaders in nonviolent movements and witnesses of violence, we seek to understand the decisions faced by those women who actively participate in armed conflict. Though these conflicts are often driven by abstract ideas – political, economic, religious – a woman’s reasons for joining an armed struggle are ultimately and profoundly personal, rooted in historical and material realities of injustice, oppression, and violence. By engaging the oft-overlooked individual experience of participating in violence, this project both supports and informs efforts for a just and lasting peace with dignity.


The stories are as distinct as the women themselves, yet each account contains valuable insight into the forces and counter-forces shaping our world.


The Project Co-Directors, Julie Michelle Klinger and Emma Gaalaas Mullaney, work and conduct research in Asia and the Americas on policies and practices concerning rural and indigenous rights, with a focus on vulnerable peoples who are underrepresented in international, national and local development and reconstruction programs. Their training, experience, and interests emphasize oral history, ethnography, and linking field-based research with institutional and political engagement.


To find out more, to join the discussion, or to make a donation, please visit www.theguerreraproject.com or get in touch with the authors at contact@theguerreraproject.com




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