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Abstract Recent postwar recovery efforts have paved the way for reforms that advance women's participation in politics, inclusion in the economy, and access to justice. In this article, we show how a singular emphasis on gender reforms after war that are inattentive to other societal cleavages can leave various forms of marginalization in the shadows. Subnational interviews on the reverberations of gender reforms in five postwar countries expose three hierarchies that structure access to rights for war-affected communities. We reveal which violence is privileged, whose violence is privileged, and which responses are privileged from the perspectives of differently situated war-affected women, showing how patterns of access to new rights can reinforce exclusionary dynamics. Importantly, because international and domestic actors tend to privilege top-down, state-based responses to wartime violence (what we term hierarchies of remedy), hierarchies of violence and victimhood frequently also reflect state actors’ priorities. Speaking to debates on legal and policy reform, we acknowledge that attention to women's rights after war offers an urgently needed corrective to earlier gender inequalities. Yet, a singular focus on gender reforms that ignores other conflict-related cleavages, particularly those that are amplified by the distribution of political power within the state apparatus, can risk obstructing access for marginalized women, sometimes reproducing grievances that contributed to violence in the first place. For policymakers, we suggest that striving for more equal access to new rights after war will help foster a more inclusive—and therefore more stable and durable—peace.
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Women and Men Politicians’ Response to War: Evidence from Ukraine
Does war deepen gender inequalities in politicians’ behavior or help erase them? We draw from the terror management theory developed in psychology to argue that the onset of a violent conflict is likely to push politicians to conform more strongly with traditional gender stereotypes because it helps individuals cope with existential fears. To test our argument, we use data on Ukrainian politicians’ engagement on social media (136,455 Facebook posts by 469 politicians) in the three months before and after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and interrupted time series analysis, to assess the effect of conflict on politicians’ behavior. We find that conflict onset deepens gender-stereotypical behavior among politicians in their public engagement. We also show that, consistent with our argument, gender biases among the public are magnified during war.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2215008
- PAR ID:
- 10636502
- Publisher / Repository:
- Cambridge University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Organization
- Volume:
- 78
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0020-8183
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 321 to 340
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818324000080
