Legible Solidarity: Women’s Politics in Conflict and Post-Conflict Aceh.

Throughout the period of separatist conflict, women in Aceh organized to remediate the effects of armed conflict on women, including addressing the use of sexual violence as a tactic of war. Like women across the world, they sought to have women’s experiences (of violence) and material reality integrated into the political sphere. If Acehnese women’s conflict-era discourse represented an attempt to expand the sphere of the political, then their post-conflict discourse signals a multiplication of axes of expansion. Tracing the transformation of politics in Aceh from the conflict period to the post-conflict sharia regime allows us to see how women’s organizations coordinated a challenge to the instantiation of Islamist politics with a distinct, Islamically-sourced Muslim politics of solidarity. The political project of women’s organizations in post-conflict Aceh, especially their opposition to the new sharia criminal code, can thus be characterized as a struggle to make solidarity legible to the state.