Highlights

Dr. Angela Nichols

WOMEN PARTICIPATION IN WAR CONFLICT IN COLOMBIA

Dr. Nichols is an assistant professor in Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Fellow from the Department of Political Science at Atlantic University. Since 3 years ago, she is working on an article about women in conflict, and this Summer 2019, she decided to visit Quindío, Colombia. With the help of Dr. Andrés Ramírez, assistant professor in College of Education at FAU, and administrators from Universidad del Quindío, she had the opportunity to travel to Armenia, Medellín, Florencia, Tolima and interviewed a group of women that were part of the FARC’s guerrilla group. Her research focuses on “Why women participate in rebel movements (Conflict)”. In her visit to Colombia, she was able to talk with 49 women from FARC’s group to talk about their experiences.

The working name that professor Nichols is using for this article is “Colombia: An Examination of Rebellion and Reincorporation” but she wants to use the term FARIANAS and it probably will be changed when she finish the article. Dr. Nichols shared that in Colombia, people have the idea that women were forced, kidnapped, manipulated, or convinced by their boyfriends to be part of conflict. Although this may be true in some cases, the reality is that there were indeed women that wanted to fight for what they believed in. “Why they joined the conflict?” is the question that she wants to answer giving examples of these women’s different experiences.

In early November, professor Nichols will present a paper in a national conference. In addition, she is interested in doing a research later in Cuba or Guatemala. But she hopes to go back to Colombia and make some more connections, keep going with this project and find over 100 interviews, because as she said “women participate in conflict, just like men participate in conflict”.

Finally, she supports the idea to promote exchange of FAU students to Quindio, and thinks that it’s great to have these kinds of connections and that we need more of them because it gives opportunities for students to learn about other countries. Travelling and studying in Latin America, allows you to better understand and know how much can we learn about it. She says “...people are immersed in their culture, politics, languages…” and “...being in a different place, changes our understanding...”