Positioning Women in Conflict Studies

Abstract

This book explores how different types of women’s status, including women’s inclusion (in politics), women’s rights, harm to women, and beliefs about women’s gender roles affect political violence, including interstate war, civil war, repression, and terrorism. However, it argues that before scholars, policymakers, and practitioners can explore these connections, it is important to overcome existing problems in the scholarship—conceptual stretching of gender equality and resulting measurement invalidity. Much of the current scholarship and policymaking conflate gender equality and women’s status. That is, they use gender equality as a catchall term that includes anything related to women. This conflation masks the individual ways in which women’s status affects different forms of political violence. Scholars and policymakers also use a multitude of indicators to measure gender equality when in reality they are measuring other concepts. This book corrects these problems and develops novel concepts and scales to determine how women’s inclusion, women’s rights, harm to women, and beliefs about women’s roles affect interstate war, civil war, repression, and terrorism within a given society. It finds that women’s inclusion is associated with fewer terror attacks; women’s rights in combination with strong women’s advocacy groups are related to less state repression; harm to women is associated with a higher probability of civil and interstate wars; and beliefs about women’s traditional gender roles within a society are correlated with more terrorism. The findings shed light on the various pathways to reduce political violence globally.