The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda establishes that the inclusion and treatment of women is integral to the maintenance of international peace and security. Activists, scholars, and policymakers have lent support to this agenda by describing links between gender inequality and political violence. Yet, gender inequality is a broad and encompassing term without strong consensus about how to define it. In Positioning Women in Conflict Studies: How Women’s Status Affects Political Violence, Sabrina Karim and Daniel W. Hill, Jr. ask researchers and policymakers to take a step back from the broad, encompassing terminology of “gender inequality” and specify measurable points of interest — which is often how women’s status in society affects political violence. The authors argue that clarity in measurement and conceptualization is needed to learn precisely how women’s status is related to political violence and their book is a demonstration of what we can learn from this careful conceptualization and measurement.
Specifically, Karim and Hill trace how the concept of gender equality has been used and show the different ways it has been “stretched” beyond its basic formulation. Concept stretching can be seen in how gender inequality is often treated as equivalent to women’s status, which is distinct from the social construction of masculinities and identity relationality, fluidity, and subordination. This leads to measurement invalidity of gender inequality measures and contributes to the systematic conflation of women and gender. Ultimately, this prevents accurate measurement, analysis, and falsifiability of theories, and obscures how specific aspects of women’s status are linked to specific (and varying) forms of political violence.
By focusing on women’s status, Karim and Hill show the utility of delineating “where women are allowed to be present and where they are not” (p. 49) from the gendered structures that lead them to be found in those positions. They describe how women’s status is ideally specified along four distinct dimensions: women’s inclusion (political/social), women’s rights, harm to women, and beliefs about women’s gender roles. Differentiating women’s status from gender inequality and delineating a particular aspect of women’s status to focus on solves common measurement problems and leads to results that challenge conventional associations between women, gender equality, and peace, as well as mainstream policy prescriptions.
After introducing the foundations for the book’s focus on women’s status in the first two chapters, the book turns to four empirical chapters. Each chapter (1) conceptualizes one facet of women’s status; (2) operationalizes that facet through a Bayesian modeling strategy that estimates a latent variable of the concept based on correlations across a set of carefully selected indicators; (3) reviews a wide-ranging and diverse literature on how this facet of women’s status affects four forms of political violence with careful attention to how critical feminist scholarship informs positivist work; and (4) uses regression modeling to evaluate the relationship between this facet and the four forms of political violence: terrorism, civil conflict, interstate war, and state repression. This is a hefty lift for each chapter, but by following the same structure in Chapters 3–6, the reader can follow the trajectory and digest theories and findings with ease.
The Bayesian estimates of each facet of women’s status solve problems confronted by standard measures by carefully grouping indicators, weighting highly covarying indicators, estimating measurement error, and allowing for informative incorporation of missing data. Such methodological advancements will be welcome by a discipline increasingly adopting cutting-edge methods. In addition, the four forms of political violence are often studied in silos. Looking at them together and compiling specific theories about how each facet of women’s status is thought to affect each form of political violence is probably the most understated contribution of the book.
While the authors find surprisingly little evidence of a link between women’s inclusion and political violence, there is more support for hypotheses about societal harms to women and women’s rights. Greater societal levels of harm to women are associated with an increased risk of intra and inter-state conflict initiation. Women’s rights, especially accompanied by watchdog organizations, are associated with decreased state violence and repression. Women’s political inclusion and beliefs about their gender roles are observed to decrease terrorist attacks.
There are also many non-findings that may seem disheartening for proponents of gender equality and peace theories and supporters of the WPS agenda; yet, allowing complex theories to fail through this empirical design and specificity is, on its own, an important contribution. Through the careful conceptualization and new measurement of different facets of women’s status (and the integration of their quantitative data with the prominent WomenStats database), Karim and Hill lay the foundation for positivist scholars to ask and assess new research questions. For example, has women’s rights affected political violence at particular points in time or under certain conditions? Why? Do beliefs about gender roles affect the lethality of terrorism? And — the reverse — how does inter and intra-state conflict affect beliefs about gender roles as compared to women’s political status or rights?
Furthermore, what is the temporal relationship between improvements in women’s status across the different domains? The data provided and approaches taken in this book also give positivist feminist scholars the tools to examine evidence of backlash, for example, by examining whether improvements in women’s political inclusion lead to greater harms to women later in time.
This contribution comes at a critical moment when gender backlash and antigender mobilizations are on the rise and understandings of the sources and ways to offset backlash have become increasingly critical. As more complete understandings of the relationships between women, women’s status, gender equality, and peace are reached, long-standing policy prescriptions, including those brought forth by UNSCR 1325 and the WPS agenda, may also be (re)evaluated to more explicitly target the aspects of women’s status with direct implications for violence.
Finally, the book’s explanation and application of concept stretching serves as a textbook model for wider academic application to other concepts (which almost certainly have been stretched). The book definitively shows why scholars should take more care to avoid conflations between women and gender. However, questions remain about how the book’s call to return to the narrower idea of women’s status will resonate among policymakers and activists. For many, gender and gender equality are concepts that are stretched, deliberately, to advance inclusive, expansive feminist agendas. Future research might consider the tension between using or departing from the broader, all-encompassing terminology of gender, as viewed by activists.
While the field of gender and conflict continues to push towards a focus on gender beyond women, Positioning Women in Conflict Studies advances the study of women and political violence by providing four conceptually clear facets of women’s status and a robust measurement approach for each. Importantly, this pathbreaking work on women’s status and political violence does not close down — but rather paves new pathways for scholars who want to use the same approach for improving conceptualization and measurement of gender and gender equality as well.
