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.
