Gender, Feminism, and Attitudes toward International Conflict: Exploring Relationships with Survey Data from the Middle East

Abstract

In an effort to contribute to the dialogue between gender studies and international studies, this report presents findings from an empirical investigation based on the integrated secondary analysis of survey data from Israel, Egypt, Palestine, and Kuwait. The goal is to assess the utility of both gender and attitudes pertaining to the circumstances of women in accounting for variance in views about war and peace, and thereafter to examine the degree to which political system attributes constitute conditionalities associated with important variable relationships. Major findings include the absence of gender-linked differences in attitudes toward international conflict in all four of the societies studied and a significant relationship in each of these societies between attitudes toward gender equality and attitudes toward international conflict. Based on data from the Arab world and Israel, with attitudes about a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict treated as the dependent variable, the research also aspires to shed light on more practical considerations pertaining to the international relations of the Middle East.

Foreign Policy Dimensions: A Comparison Between the United States and Sweden

“…12 We expect two socioeconomic variables, gender and education, to be strong predictors in foreign policy issues. Attitude differences between men and women have been identified in previous studies (Baxter and Lansing, 1983;Conover and Sapiro, 1993;Togeby, 1994;Tessler and Warriner, 1997;Bjereld, 1998), and given the fact that foreign policy issues are characterized by a lack of information and complexity, education can be another strong socioeconomic factor. Individuals are also guided by ideologies when orienting themselves within reality.…”

Democratic values and the microfoundations of Arab support for peace with Israel

“…The detection of consistent attitudinal patterns across such as diverse set of countries would tremendously improve confidence in the generalizability of findings. Third, with a single questionnaire being administered across all countries, the results are more directly comparable as was the case in earlier studies which compared results from different surveys (Tessler and Warriner, 1997;Tessler and Nachtwey, 1998). Finally, its unrivalled thematic breadth allows the in-depth investigation of a range of potentially competing claims about the drivers of Arab support for peace outlined above.…”

“…In answering this question, this paper makes several major contributions. First, it offers generalizable findings on the main drivers of Arab support for peace with Israel which build and expand upon previous research that assessed the impact of economic concerns (Astorino-Courtois, 1996;Friedman, 2005;Khashan, 2000;Nachtwey and Tessler, 2002), the private and public dimensions of religion (Haddad, 2002;Mi'ari, 1999;Shamir and Shikaki, 2002;Tessler and Nachtwey 1998;Tessler and Nachtwey 1999), gender and attitudes on gender equality (Tessler, Nachtwey and Grant, 1999;Tessler and Warriner, 1997) as well as support for democratic governance (Sahliyeh and Deng 2003) on Arab public opinion toward international conflict. In the process, this paper adds, secondly, a rare investigation of non-Western publics to the growing body of individual-level explorations of democratic peace (Inglehart, Puranen and Welzel, 2015;Johns and Davies, 2012;Lacina and Lee, 2013;Tomz and Weeks, 2013).…”

“…Israeli political and military elites warned Western observers not to view the anti-government protests sweeping the region in early 2011 through the lens of 'Berlin 1989', but rather through the lens of 'Tehran 1979' (Jones andMilton-Edwards, 2013;Magen, 2015 Another body of research on the interaction between conflict and political norms (Maoz and Russett, 1993) has sought to examine the role which gender and attitudes to gender equality play (for overviews, see Caprioli, 2000;Conover and Shapiro, 1993;Regan and Paskeviciute, 2003;Tessler and Warriner, 1997). While Tessler and Warriner (1997) could not detect any evidence of gender differences per se, they did find that in all four publics under consideration (Israel, Egypt, Palestine, and Kuwait), supporters of equality between women and men were more supportive of diplomatic efforts to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. They thus concluded that attitudes toward peace and gender equality are part of a comprehensive worldview which includes a willingness to challenge 'traditional and established ideas about right and wrong' and the 'notion that existing conflicts and differences are inescapable (Tessler and Warriner 1997: 276).…”

Do rights at home boost rights abroad? Sexual equality and humanitarian foreign policy

“…In many cases, these differences by gender identity are cross-cut or even overshadowed by gender ideology. Thus, in a situation of acute nationalist conflict in the Middle East, women are not more peace-promoting than men -but across the 'most different cases' of Israel, Egypt, Palestine, and Kuwait, more feminist men and women alike are more supportive of Middle East peace (Tessler & Warriner, 1997).…”