When Civilians Are Attacked: Gender Equality and Terrorist Targeting

Huber, Laura

doi:10.1177/0022002719835601

Cited by 21 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Women’s status is difficult to measure, necessitating the use of multiple variables to assess the robustness of the findings. Additionally, militants and civilians respond to various elements of gender norms in different ways (Huber, 2019). I include two measures of women’s status: female labor force participation and women’s political empowerment.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Terrorist organizations are sensitive to public opinion, and thus, tailor their actions based on the attitudes of civilians (Huber, 2019; Nemeth, 2010; Polo and Gleditsch, 2016; Weinstein, 2007). The reaction of the public is particularly relevant for suicide terrorism.…”

Section: The Reputational Costs Of Female Suicide Bombersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Huber (2019) argues that armed groups also consider potential reactions of government supporters, and thus, avoid targeting civilians in countries with higher levels of gender equality because of strong norms against attacking civilians in these places. She grounds this argument in the need for groups to impose high costs on governments, while incurring as few costs as possible.…”

Section: The Reputational Costs Of Female Suicide Bombersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally, terrorist groups make strategic calculations based on how they believe governments will respond to their use of terrorism (Huber, 2019; Stanton, 2013). Thus, if groups need concessions from governments that view the use of women as illegitimate, they have less incentive to recruit female cadres.…”

Section: The Reputational Costs Of Female Suicide Bombersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, armed groups with conservative supporters face backlash for expanding the role of women in their organizations (O’Rourke, 2009). Militant groups are sensitive to gender norms in broader society, and modify their behavior to avoid backlash from the public beyond their direct constituents (Huber, 2019). Thus, armed groups face more backlash from their supporters for using female suicide bombers in less gender egalitarian societies.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The tradeoffs of using female suicide bombers

Soules

2020

Conflict Management and Peace Science

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Why are there so few female suicide bombers despite their tactical effectiveness? To explain the rarity of this phenomenon, I examine the tradeoffs that armed groups face when using female suicide bombers. While rigid gender norms make female bombers more effective because security personnel are less suspicious of them, gender inequality also drives down the demand for female suicide bombers. I posit that the tradeoffs of using female bombers induce a curvilinear relationship between women’s status and the prevalence of female suicide bombers. Specifically, I argue that female bombers will be more common in countries with middling levels of gender equality than in highly equal or unequal societies. Using data on over 5,500 suicide attacks, from 1974 to 2016, I find support for this hypothesis.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Reputational Costs Of Female Suicide Bombersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Reputational Costs Of Female Suicide Bombersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Reputational Costs Of Female Suicide Bombersmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The tradeoffs of using female suicide bombers

Soules

2020

Conflict Management and Peace Science

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Do burqa bans make us safer? Veil prohibitions and terrorism in Europe

Saiya

Manchanda

2019

Journal of European Public Policy

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Over the past decade, several European states have moved to ban or restrict the wearing of Islamic face veils. Supporters of these bans maintain that they are necessary to ensure national security and cultural assimilation. Opponents, on the other hand, argue that prohibitions on the veil unjustly restrict the religious liberty of Muslim women. Interestingly, though, despite the controversy surrounding restrictions and bans on the veil and conflicting expectations on the effects of these limitations, little research has attempted to rigorously analyse their effect on radicalization. We seek to address this gap through a statistical analysis of the effects of these laws on Islamist terrorism in the states of Europe. We find that states that enforce veil bans are indeed statistically much more likely to experience more and more lethal Islamist terrorist attacks than countries where such laws do not exist.

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Positioning Women in Conflict Studies

Karim,

Hill, Jr.

2024

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This book explores how different types of women’s status, including women’s inclusion (in politics), women’s rights, harm to women, and beliefs about women’s gender roles affect political violence, including interstate war, civil war, repression, and terrorism. However, it argues that before scholars, policymakers, and practitioners can explore these connections, it is important to overcome existing problems in the scholarship—conceptual stretching of gender equality and resulting measurement invalidity. Much of the current scholarship and policymaking conflate gender equality and women’s status. That is, they use gender equality as a catchall term that includes anything related to women. This conflation masks the individual ways in which women’s status affects different forms of political violence. Scholars and policymakers also use a multitude of indicators to measure gender equality when in reality they are measuring other concepts. This book corrects these problems and develops novel concepts and scales to determine how women’s inclusion, women’s rights, harm to women, and beliefs about women’s roles affect interstate war, civil war, repression, and terrorism within a given society. It finds that women’s inclusion is associated with fewer terror attacks; women’s rights in combination with strong women’s advocacy groups are related to less state repression; harm to women is associated with a higher probability of civil and interstate wars; and beliefs about women’s traditional gender roles within a society are correlated with more terrorism. The findings shed light on the various pathways to reduce political violence globally.

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When Civilians Are Attacked: Gender Equality and Terrorist Targeting

Cited by 21 publications

References 61 publications

The tradeoffs of using female suicide bombers

The tradeoffs of using female suicide bombers

Do burqa bans make us safer? Veil prohibitions and terrorism in Europe

Positioning Women in Conflict Studies

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