Women, Gender, and Political Violence

Research Overview

My research on Women, Gender, and Political Violence asks the following questions:

  • How does sex and/or gender inequality affect political violence and vice versa?

  • How do we measure sex/gender inequality?

  • How do sex and gender affect security force personnel’s beliefs about violence?

  • How do conflict/post-conflict processes affect beliefs about gender and/or continued (gender-based) violence?

Research Methods: Bayesian scales of women’s status globally and large-scale surveys of security force personnel in different countries

My research on women, gender, and political violence first unpacks the difference between sex and gender inequality. At the macro level, it finds that different country-level measures of women’s status such as women’s inclusion, women’s rights, harm to women, and beliefs about women’s roles have varying effects on political violence outcomes. Out of these indicators, harm to women is most likely to increase the propensity for some forms of political violence. At the micro-level, we find that beliefs about toxic masculinity and rigid gender roles are strongly correlated with beliefs about escalating violence, finding misconduct acceptable, and being less likely to report it. The research generated by the Gender and Security Sector Lab also fits within this research agenda.

Peer-Reviewed Published Research

  • Recent world events, such as the rise of hypermasculine authoritarian leaders, have shown the importance of both sex and gender for understanding international politics. However, quantitative researchers of conflict have long relegated the study of sex and gender inequality as a cause of war to a specialized group of scholars, despite overwhelming evidence that the connections are profound and consequential. In this review essay, we demonstrate the tremendous progress made in this field by analyzing a wave of research that examines the relationships between sex and gender inequality and war. We divide this work into theories that emphasize strategy versus those that analyze structures. In addition, we focus on two aspects of this research agenda—specifying mechanisms that link sex and gender inequality to war, and leveraging data at multiple levels of analysis—to outline fruitful pathways forward for the broader international security research agenda. Ultimately, we argue that the study of the nexus of sex and gender inequality and war will enliven theoretical debates, illuminate new hypotheses, and enrich the policy discourse with robust evidence.

  • The book starts from the premise that existing research on gender equality and violent political conflict “stretches” the concept of gender equality and equates it with the status of women in society. This basic conceptual problem impedes efforts to theorize and empirically examine the connection between gender equality, women’s status, and political violence. To overcome these problems, the book suggests differentiating concepts and measures and delineating distinct theories about the connection between women's status and political violence. The book separates the concept of women’s status into the four different aspects of women’s inclusion, women’s rights, harm to women, and beliefs about women’s roles. It then develops unique and original measures for each of them using an approach to measurement that offers several advantages over common practices. The remainder of the book is then devoted to reviewing, synthesizing, and further developing theories about how women’s inclusion, women’s rights, harm to women, and beliefs about women’s gender roles affect inter-state war onset, intra-state conflict onset, state repression/human rights violations, and terrorism. The connections between each of these concepts and each type of political violence are examined using the original measures developed in the book. The results suggest that the relationships between women’s status and political violence are not uniform and vary across different aspects of women’s status as well as different kinds of political violence. Women’s inclusion in politics is associated with fewer terrorist attacks, women’s rights are correlated with a reduction in state repression/human rights violations, harm to women is associated with an increased risk of civil war and the initiation of inter-state violence, and Beliefs about women’s roles (a belief in gender stereotypes) is associated with more frequent terror attacks. Overall, the book demonstrates how the conceptualization and measurement of gender equality and women’s status is critical to better understand how to reduce political violence globally.

Work in Progress

  • Violent public attacks on women by men are increasing across the global. And the underlying motivation for this violence seems to be a deep and abiding hatred of women, gender equality, and feminism. In this study, we look at the manosphere or a collection of blogs, forums, social media accounts, and websites that purport to focus on issues relating to men and masculinity, but, in actuality, blame women, feminism and gender equality for these problems. despite its increasing prominence and violent impact, political science has largely overlooked the manosphere as political. Therefore, in the paper, we investigate to what extent can groups within the manosphere be considered a political actors, specifically a counter? And to what extent to do they make up a countermovement. To answer this question, we created a novel dataset of over 100 websites and blogs belonging to the manosphere, and then utilized this data to develop a conceptual framework of the manosphere’s different subgroups. This allows us to categorize the varying groups within the manosphere by elucidating similarities and differences between them.

  • Much of the scholarship on rape addresses variation in or legacies of wartime sexual violence. We pivot to focus on the legacies of post-conflict state building processes, and argue that masculine peace-building processes can contribute to rape. Specifically, when international peacekeepers engage in transactional sex, they alter local sex economies and fundamentally change expectations around romantic relationships in the host country. These changes make it more difficult for local men to enter into (sexual) relationships with local women, which may lead to rape. To test these intuitions, we use novel, quantitative data on rape from One Stop Centers in Monrovia, Liberia collected between 2015-2019. We supplement these data with over one-hundred and seventy original interviews with perpetrators of rape and community leaders. Triangulating our data, we find support for our theory. The paper problematizes large-scale, masculine peace building projects as a means to promote gender equality in host countries.