With the passing of several UN Security Council Resolutions related to Women, Peace and Security, gender balancing security sector reforms (SSR)—or policies that ensure the equal participation of women in the security sector—have received increased global attention over the past two decades. However, to date, there is no explanation for variation in their adoption. This paper examines the internationalization of SSR gender reform, arguing that the presence of a peacekeeping mission within a post-conflict country affects the state’s resources and political will to adopt gender balancing reforms. We explore the effect of multidimensional peacekeeping using an original dataset on SSR in post-conflict countries, the Security Sector Reform Dataset, from 1989 to 2012. We find that peacekeeping missions increase the probability that a state will adopt gender balancing reforms in SSR. As the first cross-national quantitative examination of gender balancing reforms, these findings also shed light on the conditions under which states adopt security sector reforms more generally.

While scholars demonstrate a consistent negative relationship between gender equality and violence, the effect of women’s rights on the quality of terrorism and the type of victims targeted remains unexplored. This article introduces a new model of terrorists’ strategic targeting by examining the trade-off between the ease of a civilian-oriented attack and the negative public reaction these attacks invoke. Within this framework, gender equality increases the costs of civilian targeting by inducing public opinion costs. As gender equality increases, the costs of attacking civilians increase relatively more than government-oriented attacks. Using data on domestic terrorism between 1970 and 2007 and a subnational examination of a randomly implemented gender quota in India, this study demonstrates that as gender equality increases, the ratio of civilian-oriented to government-oriented attacks decreases. Overall, this study refines our understanding of terrorists’ strategic targeting and identifies heterogeneity in the Women, Peace, and Security theory.

The degree to which female political actors influence policy is hotly debated in political science. However, relatively little research considers how women’s representation in the police influences policing outcomes. We argue that increasing women’s representation should be associated with increases in rape report rates but should not be associated with changes in rape arrest rates. We expect public perceptions of female police to affect victims’ willingness to report and cooperate with the police, but the masculine, hierarchical, and complex nature of police investigations of rape will make it difficult for those increases in reporting to translate into increases in arrests for those crimes. We leverage unique police administrative data from 1987 to 2016 and find that although women’s representation is associated with increased rape report rates, there is no relationship with rape arrest rates, highlighting an important justice gap. Our article has implications not only for the study of female representation and representative bureaucracy but also provides insights into how descriptive representation may be limited by institutional culture, norms, practices, and procedures.

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Despite conflict's violent and deleterious impacts, scholarship increasingly demonstrates that women's political rights at the macro-level increase after conflict. However, relatively less is understood about how conflict impacts women's security at the micro-level, especially regarding how it impacts men's and women's attitudes toward intimate partner violence. While conflict can challenge traditional gender roles that justify wife beating, it also promotes hypermasculinity, normalizes violence, and leads to backlash against women in an attempt to re-establish traditional gender hierarchies. International actors, particularly through aid, moderate the impact of conflict on attitudes toward wife beating by encouraging progressive gender roles and increasing socio-economic development. Using Demographic Health Survey data in Uganda, this analysis compares the influence of conflict and international aid at the microlevel on approval of wife beating. The results demonstrate that women exposed to both conflict and aid are relatively less likely to approve of wife beating relative to women exposed to conflict alone. In contrast, men exposed to violence and aid do not alter their justification of wife beating. This study clarifies how conflict impacts attitudes toward women's rights at the microlevel.