The Micro-Level Effects of Civil Wars on Multiple Dimensions of Women's Empowerment

Project Information

WarEffects

Grant agreement ID: 101040948

DOI

10.3030/101040948

EC signature date 7 July 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 784 229,00

EU contribution

€ 1 784 229,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITETET I BERGEN
Norway

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WarEffects (The Micro-Level Effects of Civil Wars on Multiple Dimensions of Women's Empowerment)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Conventional wisdom suggests that wars, insecurity, and violence pose a threat to women, girls, and gender equality. However, the academic literature is divided on the question of how wars influence women's social and political empowerment.

WarEffects aims to develop a systematic, nuanced, and rigorous understanding of how civil wars and insecurity affect women's social and political empowerment and gender equality at the local level. Recent quantitative research suggests that civil wars can promote women's political representation, but these studies often reflect country-level aggregate measures (e.g. the share of women in parliament), thus focusing on a minority of 'elite' women. 'Elite' women are significantly more educated, affluent, urban, and better connected than women on average. Consequently, these findings do not inform us how subnational and individual-level variations in civil war experiences affect the majority of 'non-elite' women and gender equality locally.

To address this gap, the project proposes a novel conceptual framework that simultaneously explores the effects of civil wars on i) multiple dimensions of women's empowerment in the household, community, and local politics. Additionally, the project introduces ii) nuanced definitions and measures for different types of exposure to civil wars, iii) the distinction between changes in gender roles and gender attitudes, and iv) the moderating effect of contextual conditions.

By examining variations across these four dimensions, the project allows us to generate a comprehensive set of hypotheses to understand when, why, and how civil wars and insecurity promote women's empowerment, and when they do not. To empirically explore these hypotheses, the project combines novel quantitative survey experiments and qualitative research in several cases including DR Congo and Sri Lanka. Although each country has experienced several decades of civil war, significant within-case and between-case variations in social context, conflict dimensions, patterns of violence, and conflict status make them ideal for exploring the local effects of civil war violence on women's empowerment.

This comparative design allows the project to identify common patterns, divergences, and conditional effects. Altogether, these findings establish a new conceptual research platform and novel empirical methods to better understand the impact of civil wars on gender relations.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

PUBLICATIONS

By September 2024, researchers associated with the WarEffects project can report major scientific achievements in line with the project objectives. Two articles have been published in the leading political science journals:

1. Carlo Koos (PI) and Richard Traunmüller (University of Mannheim) have published an article titled "The gendered costs of stigma: How experiences of conflict-related sexual violence affect civic engagement for women and men". This comparative study assesses shows the effect of experiences of conflict-related sexual violence on civic engagement in the American Journal of Political Science (available among other here: https://osf.io/dn9rw).

2. Summer Lindsey (Rutgers University) and Carlo Koos (PI) have published a paper titled "Legacies of Wartime Sexual Violence: Survivors, Psychological Harms, and Mobilization" which explores how wartime sexual violence affects sociopolitical mobilization among survivors. The article has been published in the American Political Science Review (available among others here: https://osf.io/grqhm).


WORKING PAPERS

By September 2024, one manuscript, titled "The Gendered Consequences of Killing Women Activists in Local Elections" has received a revise & resubmit at the Journal of Peace Research. This article has been written by Andres Rivera, Juliana Tappe, and Carlo Koos (PI) and assesses the electoral effects of violence against female activists in Colombia.

By September 2024, one conceptual manuscript, titled "Does Conflict and War Really Promote Gender Equality?" has been drafted. This paper takes stock of the existing literature on the relationship between conflict and women's empowerment, identifies research gaps, and proposes both conceptual and methodological innovations to overcome the limitations in the prior literature.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

WarEffects aims to advance three strands of academic literature: i) quantitative cross-country research on women, peace, and security, ii) micro-level research on the legacy of violence in civil wars, and iii) qualitative literature on gender and war.

First, quantitative research suggests civil wars promote women’s political representation, but often focuses on 'elite' women at the national level. WarEffects will provide micro-level findings to complement this research and address how civil war exposure affects 'non-elite' women locally.

Second, literature on the legacy of violence suggests individual exposure to violence increases prosocial behavior and political engagement, using subnational data and rigorous empirical methods. However, it often neglects the impact on women's empowerment and gender relations. WarEffects builds on these methods and incorporates gender relations into the study of civil war legacies.

Third, qualitative literature on women and gender during and after war provides various accounts, from increased discrimination due to war-related norms of masculinity to women’s mobilization in response to threats. This literature often lacks empirical rigor, limiting broader conclusions about how civil wars affect women's empowerment and gender relations. WarEffects integrates concepts and theories from feminist research into empirical studies of gender relations in civil war contexts.

These three research strands provide important starting points but do not fully explain i) general patterns of the civil war-women’s empowerment nexus, ii) differential effects in family, community, and politics, and iii) mechanisms underpinning changes in women’s empowerment. WarEffects will shape the research frontier by providing theoretically informed, rigorous evidence on the relationship between conflict, women's empowerment, and gender relations. Additionally, it offers a new theoretical framework for expanding the field and empirical approaches to investigate new theories and hypotheses.

As described in the section "work performed and main achievements", researchers associated with the WarEffects project have demonstrated how the use of 'list experiments' helps overcoming non-disclosure bias when researching people's exposure to violence by providing respondents anonymity. Two articles using this technique have been published in the two leading political science journals, the American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science.