PhD defence by Kateringa Akeimastou
This dissertation explores the relationship between political and gender-based violence during the Greek Civil War (1944–1949). It takes the state of exception, as theorised by Carl Schmitt in Political Theology, as its main analytical entry point in order to examine how violence was produced and legitimised. As pre-war structures collapsed and normative gender roles were destabilised, women across the political spectrum were compelled to assume active roles
within the conflict. The aim is to reconstruct the repertoire of violence experienced—and, at times, exercised—by women within a context of intense political polarisation and social upheaval.
The absence of a common external enemy intensified division and suspicion. Within this setting, women occupied a precarious position, facing a threefold war: the civil conflict itself; specifically gendered forms of political violence; and an intra-gendered conflict produced by political division, which forced them to negotiate friendships and enmities along ideological lines. The central hypothesis is that the conscious decision of the two opposing
camps—the reconstituted state and the Communist Party of Greece—to enter into open confrontation constituted the civil war as a state of exception. This is examined through three axes: the fragmentation of sovereignty into competing claims to authority, the division of society into friends and enemies, and the normalisation of violence through the suspension of legal constraints.
Under these conditions, women formed relations of alignment and enmity based on political affiliation. Two dominant and politically instrumentalised groupings emerged: exceptional women , aligned with the state and conservative values, and women of exception , associated with the left. As gender norms lost part of their regulatory force, women entered a gendered state of exception that deepened pre-existing inequalities.
The dissertation argues that gender-based and sexual violence were constitutive of political violence, rendering the Greek Civil War also a gender war within the war.
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