Understanding the Impact and Consequences of Gendered Political Violence

As an emerging field, the study of violence against women in politics (VAWP) (Krook, 2020) and gendered political violence (GPV) (Bardall et al., 2020), benefits enormously from the space offered by the ECPR Joint Sessions. Touching on different research questions, this workshop will be the latest in a series. In 2019, Bjarnegård and Krook organized the first workshop on the topic. One important outcome from that workshop was to expand and clarify the concept of political violence, from its traditional definition as “the use or threat of force for political ends”, into a broader perspective that encompasses “acts of violation, abuse, intimidation, and harassment targeting political figures”. Later, a second workshop organised by Mügge and Wang was motivated by the less-studied issue of the intersectional effects of violence against political actors (Belschner et al., 2020; Mügge & Erzeel, 2016). There was consensus among participants that the field would benefit from more nuanced conceptual and methodological work on the very concept of intersectionality and how that can be operationalized for empirical research. This 2024 workshop seeks to move beyond the (still important) goal of describing GPV and VAWP. We aim to understand how experiences of violence interplay with ideology, political goals, group dynamics, and socio-economic conditions in shaping political participation of women, men, ethnic, sexual, and other underrepresented minorities; as well as to evaluate the supporting structures that parties and governments have put in place to address gendered political violence.

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1: What are the consequences of experiencing gendered political violence among marginalized groups?
2: How can knowledge and lessons learned be transported from one country to another?
3: What role do parties play in preventing and addressing GPV? What role should they play?
4: How can we comprehend the roles that men fulfil, both as initiators and recipients of violence?
5: How can we better study the impacts and consequences of VAWP and GPV?

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