Ever since the field of international relations moved on from being the narrow study of European dynastic politics, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the role of family in conflict and security. This week and next, to belatedly honor the release of F9, we’ll be reversing course and highlighting new research about how family networks shape individual decisions about security.

In their new article in International Peacekeeping, political scientists Carla Suarez and Erin Baines take on a particularly thorny question of family in conflict: How to understand the family ties among people subject to forced marriages and pregnancy by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). During its 21-year war against the Ugandan government, the LRA abducted as many as 38,000 children into its ranks. As a method of further ensnaring and indoctrinating young abductees, the group often assigned boys and young men who had performed well in battle a “wife” (Suarez and Baines put “wife” and “husband” in quotations to denote the forced nature of these unions, a convention that we have adopted here). After the conflict ended, many members of these forced marriages were left with a conundrum: They had a family, often with children of their own, but that family originated as a coercive strategy in a war they wished to leave behind. How would they relate to that family in a post-conflict setting?

Aside from the human dilemma created by forced marriages, Suarez and Baines argue that there are important political stakes to the question of what happens to coerced marriages after conflict. Programs to reintegrate insurgent fighters after civil wars end often focus on military networks as the most salient ties left over from the war era. Some programs seek to break those ties, sending fighters from the same unit to all different corners of the country in the hope that it will prevent the unit from re-forming and launching new attacks. More recent research, however — including by Midnight Oil alumna Nikkie Wiegink — suggests that relationships between members of the same unit during wars can help former fighters survive in the post-war period. Often estranged from their home communities and lacking peacetime skills, former fighters rely on one another for mutual support.

This debate about reintegration programs and military networks, however, largely ignores the family networks of former fighters. From Suarez and Baines’ long-running field work with former LRA members, they’ve concluded that family networks are also crucial to the lives former fighters make for themselves after conflict, even if those networks are particularly fraught. For one thing, the researchers found that many men they spoke to saw their families as being key to their decision to defect from the LRA. Some defected to protect their “wives,” who, even if they escaped the LRA, were often rejected by their “husband’s” extended family. Others defected to get their children away from the conflict. In interviews, one recounted that, “When I got a child, it became challenging because that was a time the war was intense… Looking at the condition that my child was going through, led me to ask, ‘why I am suffering and my child is also suffering?’” He abandoned the LRA soon after his child was born.

Despite the centrality of family relations to these and other crucial security decisions, little official attention was paid to the fate of LRA coerced marriages in the wake of the conflict. Indeed, reception centers for people escaping the LRA encouraged the separation of families born of coerced marriage, in an effort to help people put the war behind them. For LRA families in which men wished to resume responsibility for their children in the post-conflict era, that approach by the reception centers made it very difficult to do so. Most fathers who left the LRA did not know the location of their children, and sometimes did not even know the location or real name of their “wife.” Women leaving their LRA “husbands” often had trouble integrating into new families and communities, and were left without support from either their LRA family or their post-conflict family. Their efforts to reunite with their “husbands” were also frustrated by the same policies.

Suarez and Baines highlight these practices as what they call a “blind spot” in post-conflict reintegration policy. Their work with former LRA members makes clear the extent to which family considerations mediate security decisions even in the most fraught circumstances. When policymakers decide how to bring former insurgents back into civilian life, their nuclear families deserve consideration as potential networks of support along with their siblings in arms.

Rebecca Kanthor recounted the experience of feminist and LGBTQ activists in China who face online censorship of their work. Recently, the Chinese social media giant Weibo suspended the accounts of LGBTQ student groups and prominent feminist activists. One activist tried to sue to restore her account, but Chinese courts have simply ignored her petition. Organizers of affected LGBTQ groups worry that the censorship will spread, potentially including banning the groups themselves from university campuses.

Paul Carrol and Bonnie Klassen explained the role of US sanctions in severely worsening the economic situation in Cuba. COVID-19 has helped create a dire economic crisis in Cuba, and attempts by the government and NGO community to respond to the pandemic and its consequences have been hamstrung by US sanctions. Food aid shipments have been held up for months in US bureaucracy, while the designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terror makes any coordination with the Cuban government very risky for aid groups. The Biden administration has begun a review of US sanctions policy against Cuba, but the outcome of that review may not come soon enough for suffering Cubans.

Anna Kusmer spoke to the authors of a new report on the links between the solar power industry and forced labor camps in Xinjiang province, China. Companies in Xinjiang produce 45% of the world’s polysilicon, a crucial ingredient in solar panel production. At least nine of those companies have been linked to forced labor, which largely targets ethnic Uyghurs. The US has sanctioned some of the companies involved, but none of the sanctions so far have targeted polysilicon production in particular. As it currently stands, an expert told Kusmer, “all solar panels, in the end, are contaminated by forced labor in Xinjiang.”

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Tweet of the week.

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