Irregular warfare in Spain: violence and gender in the degenerated war

As comparative analyses of irregular warfare have shown, two of the principal means of deciphering forms of degenerated, irregular warfare are the participation of women and the persecution of unarmed civilians. To unravel the nature of irregular warfare in post-civil war Spain, the present paper will combine these emphases, focusing upon the changing roles of women who found themselves in the middle of the theatre of operations between 1939 and 1952, in the war between the Spanish Francoist state and the guerrillas. This ‘little’ war generated praxis, in which some women decided to become involved, or into which they were dragged, more specifically praxis of control, violence, adaptation or resistance. Lacking clear rules, irregular warfare imposes itself as a space of constant and daily management of legal, political and personal securities and insecurities, thus blurring the boundary between the public and the private. By addressing some individual cases – which range from active resistance, attempts by state forces to enforce reproductive control, effective or forced collaboration, renunciation of the guerrillas, torture and death – this paper will analyse, through the centrality of guerrilla and counter-guerrilla praxis linked to women’s agencies, the dimensions and scales of irregular warfare in Spain.