Positioning Women in Conflict Studies: How Women's Status Affects Political Violence

For decades, scholars have asserted that gender matters when it comes to domestic and international politics and that gender equality means more than the rights and inclusion of women in the political sphere. Yet the existing research on gender equality and violent political conflict tends to equate and conflate gender equality with observable indicators related to women's inclusion in formal politics. Consequently, this conceptual problem has impeded efforts to theorize and empirically examine the connection between gender equality, women's status, and political violence.

In Positioning Women in Conflict Studies, Sabrina Karim and Daniel W. Hill, Jr., develop an original framework to study the condition of women in peace and conflict that avoids conflating gender equality with other terms. Karim and Hill re-evaluate the literature on gender, international politics, and conflict to reveal that the term "gender equality" is often used to refer to four distinct concepts: women's inclusion, women's rights, harm to women, and beliefs about women's roles. They develop original measures for each of these concepts and examine their impact on inter-state war onset, intra-state conflict onset, state repression/human rights violations, and terrorism. 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 types of political violence. Overall, Positioning Women in Conflict Studies demonstrates how the conceptualization and measurement of gender equality and women's status is critical in understanding how to reduce political violence globally.