Apekshya Prasai: Up in arms

New research shows how female activists resist patriarchy on the battlefield and beyond. Although women's wartime roles and agency tend to be neglected in conventional discourses on conflict, there are times when women not only take up arms but also shape the practices and policies of insurgent groups they fight for. Apekshya Prasai, a PhD candidate in MIT's Department of Political Science, studies how rebel groups subvert entrenched patriarchal structures, ideas, and norms, and the role women play in this process.     "All insurgents operate in, recruit from, and depend on communities where half the population is female," says Prasai, a member of the Security Studies Program and an International Security Program research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center. "I find that when organizing rebellion, some insurgents strictly adhere to patriarchal gender norms while others challenge these norms in radical ways."     Prasai has conducted extensive interview-based and archival fieldwork on leftist insurgencies across South Asia, especially the People's War that unfolded in her native country of Nepal. Her work to date has already won significant notice. Most recently, she earned a Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholars Award, which recognizes promising doctoral work investigating urgent, present-day problems of violence.