Women and conflict: The Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh

Women and conflict, the two key concepts used in this paper appear to be interlinked. This linkage is some-what structural, though the modern knowledge system would have us believe otherwise. The thing called gender and its structures parameters have neatly divided the worlds of men and women into private and public with the women being relegated into the private. Conflict, violence, armed conflict are supposedly matters of high politics associated with the public domain, women thus are not to be part of this. This divide however begs the question of the very logic of this divide and also questions the notion of citizenship, its many inclusions and exclusions. The later in many instances apply to the marginalized, women one may argue being a part of the latter. Having said this, however one needs to be very specific that women is not a homogenous category, differences and divides cut across class, caste, religious, cultural, ethnic lines. Women again are not a category inherently peaceful, this gender ascription as suggested earlier is a construction of modernity. This paper takes up the issues of Tracts (CHT), Bangladesh. The paper is divided into three sections. The first provides an overview of the conflict scenario in the CHT, the second is an account of women’s responses, and the concluding section suggests some ways to break the binaries.