Despite their multifaceted participation and their suffering in many ways, women have been relatively neglected in scholarship about war and conflict, all the more so in the Middle East and North Africa. The guiding assumption that women are part of the home and private world and not active in the public world of politics and conflict, especially in the MENA area, has long exacerbated the ways in which women’s participation has been ignored. Further, early anthropologists of the MENA region were men and talked with men in the field, who of course talked about their own worldviews and male activities. Women anthropologists going into the field during times of conflict and violence began to change the story. As a pioneer in this area, Suad Joseph (1983) showed how women maintained communications in conflict-ridden Lebanon, even across sectarian lines. In 1986 MERIP, Middle East Report, featured a...
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