How is Political Violence Gendered? Disentangling Motives, Forms, and Impacts
| Author | Jennifer M Piscopo,Gabrielle Bardall,Elin Bjarnegård |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719881812 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719881812
Political Studies
2020, Vol. 68(4) 916 –935
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321719881812
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How is Political Violence
Gendered? Disentangling
Motives, Forms, and Impacts
Gabrielle Bardall1, Elin Bjarnegård2
and Jennifer M Piscopo3
Abstract
How is political violence gendered? We connect the traditional political violence literature’s
emphasis on categorizing attacks to the gender and politics literature’s analysis of the barriers to
women’s political participation. Our framework separates gendered political violence into three
elements. Gendered motives appear when perpetrators use violence to preserve hegemonic men’s
control of politics. Gendered forms emphasize how gender roles and tropes differentially shape
men’s and women’s experiences of violence. Gendered impacts capture the subjective meaning-
making processes that occur as different audiences react to political violence. This approach
offers researchers and policymakers greater analytic precision regarding how political violence is
gendered.
Keywords
gender, political violence, political participation, elections, conflict studies
Accepted: 19 September 2019
The dramatic expansion of women’s political participation during the last decades has
pushed scholars to consider how women’s presence (or absence) alters the form, nature,
and content of politics (Baldez, 2010; Beckwith, 2010; Franceschet et al., 2012). Yet many
topics within political science still lack a gender perspective, particularly the relationship
between political participation and violence. Political violence violates human rights,
impedes democracy from developing, consolidating or flourishing, and undermines the
relationships of fairness, transparency, and trust upon which good governments are built.
Studies of political violence traditionally took a narrow view, privileging physical assault
and focusing on conflict settings or regime transitions. Yet if political violence circum-
scribes women’s participation in ways not previously understood—because studies of
1Centre for International Policy Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada
2Department of Government, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
3Department of Politics, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Corresponding author:
Jennifer M Piscopo, Department of Politics, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041, USA.
Email: piscopo@oxy.edu
881812PSX0010.1177/0032321719881812Political StudiesBardall et al.
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political violence traditionally measure men’s experiences or because the barriers women
face do not always register as violence—then conclusions about democratic quality and
integrity may be biased.
Certainly, scholars in the area of feminist security studies have documented the gen-
dered effects of civil war (e.g. Cohen, 2016) and the roles played by women as combat-
ants, survivors, and peacebuilders (e.g. Davies and True, 2019). Similarly, comparative
politics scholars applying a gender lens have recognized that violence differentially
affects men’s and women’s participation in new democracies (e.g. Hadzic and Tavits,
2019; Tripp, 2015). But until recently, researchers have paid less attention to the gendered
aspects of political violence in more “mundane” settings—meaning violence that disrupts
the regular practices of holding elections and governing, disruptions which occur in both
unstable and stable regimes. By contrast, gender and politics scholars have analyzed the
resistance and backlash to women’s political participation that occurs because they are
women (Sen et al., 2019). Some have labeled this phenomenon violence against women
in politics, or VAWIP (Krook, 2017; Krook and Restrepo Sanín, 2016, 2019), a term that
has become increasingly popular among practitioners (e.g. Ballington et al., 2017;
Hubbard and DeSoi, 2016; Huber and Kammerud, 2017; Inter-Parliamentary Union
(IPU), 2016; ParlAmericas, n.d.). Yet whether these approaches constitute competing or
complementary frameworks remains poorly understood. When politically active women
face barriers to their participation, is it political violence, violence against women, or
both—and how do we know? If political violence encompasses a larger set of harms in a
wider set of places, how is such violence gendered? This article brings together two sepa-
rate strands of scholarship: work on political violence that seeks to categorize discrete
attacks, and work from gender and politics that focuses on documenting the barriers to
women’s political participation. In doing so, we offer a new framework for identifying the
gendered dimensions of political violence, broadly understood as any violence that
impedes the regular unfolding of political processes.
Recent high-profile cases demonstrate how the choice of frameworks affects the
explanation of the event. British Member of Parliament Jo Cox was murdered by a white
supremacist in June 2016. Was her attacker motivated by outrage at Cox’s pro-immigrant
views (political violence) or her temerity to enter a man’s space as a woman (VAWIP)?
The answer matters for the policy response. Activists and policymakers focusing on vio-
lence against women will look to end the mistreatment women face in political spaces (as
seen in the National Democratic Institute’s #NotTheCost campaign). By contrast, those
concerned with political violence might establish security measures that take more com-
prehensive views of risk (as exemplified in the British Parliament’s new task force to
investigate on-line threats against all MPs). Yet both responses might be necessary, sug-
gesting that the political violence approach and the VAWIP approach cannot remain in
their siloes. We link the two, arguing that the VAWIP approach shows how gender can
motivate attacks, while the political violence approach identifies how gender could fur-
ther appear in the form or impact of violence.
Our framework thus argues that political violence can be gendered in multiple but
distinct ways. Gendered motives appear when perpetrators use violence to preserve
hegemonic men’s control of the political system. Across the globe, men who belong to
their country’s structurally dominant cultural, ethnic, or religious group hold most politi-
cal offices (Hughes, 2011). Actors who use violence to resist devolving political power to
those outside the hegemonic male group (meaning women, but also non-dominant men
and gay, queer, non-binary, and trans individuals) are committing political violence for
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