Gender-Differentiated and Gender-Motivated Political Violence: A Research Agenda

Development experts, academic researchers, and domestic and international leaders recently have focused on the intersecting—and often-interlocking—phenomena of political and election violence, repression of citizen’s political participation, and discrimination and even violence against women in the public sphere. The resulting set of academic and policy papers have been prolific and provocative, yet characterized by numerous conceptual and methodological contradictions and gaps. This paper orients this emergent public policy agenda towards greater conceptual clarity and methodological sophistication. First, we argue for analytically distinguishing violence from discrimination and political and electoral violence from societal and domestic violence. Though incidents may overlap in practice, this distinction drives more effective policy interventions. Second, to further sharpen distinctions and enhance policy responses, we build upon the extant scholarly and practitioner literature to also distinguish among violence’s motivations and objectives. We insist upon differentiating between political violence that is gender-differentiated versus political violence that is gender-motivated. The former captures political violence that men and women experience differentially for reasons of gender (i.e., voter intimidation in which male citizens are physically threatened while female citizens are sexually assaulted) whereas the latter conceptualizes political violence that aims to remove certain participants from the public sphere because of their gender. Third, we use these distinctions to delineate a forward research agenda defined by conceptual precision and appropriate methodological approaches and indicators. Our conceptual schema indicates how scholars can go about investigating key extant questions, such as whether violence against female politicians indicates a backlash to women’s political empowerment, or a longstanding phenomenon previously overlooked by researchers’ focused on male violence. In summary, the paper guides researchers and policymakers into more precise problem definitions and measurements, ensuring that policy responses target the root causes and tensions.