This article looks at how the category of female fighters in the Sierra Leone civil war (1991–2002) was interpreted by the local population and by the international humanitarian community. The category of the female fighter both challenges and confuses the gendered stereotypes of ‘woman the victim’ and ‘man the perpetrator’ on multiple levels. Most research on ‘women and war’ focuses on women either as inherently more peaceful or merely as victims, and often unwittingly reproduces in ‘war-affected women’ a corresponding lack of ‘agency’. In this article, I criticize such theorizing by demonstrating the diversity and specificity of Sierra Leonean women's war experiences, while also examining how the notion of and discourse about war itself is gendered. While it has become necessary to expand the inquiries into what women do in war and to critically analyse women's roles as perpetuators and perpetrators of war and conflict, this article maintains that in situations where one can talk about the violence of women, as in the example of female combatants, one often finds violence against women as well.

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of policy. While there is some repetition of ideas, concepts and case material in parts (which is inevitable given most of the chapters once stood alone), this is reinforcing rather than tedious. There is a determined message in this textthat the technocratic dimensions associated with doing gender analysis need to be peeled back, revealed as inherently political and in turn made more democratic and participatory. While critical of much of current gender mainstreaming practice, this collection does not give up on the concept but offers alternative ideas about how it can be done effectively, and in ways that undermine entrenched gendered and race-based power relations.