Unpacking the concepts: Examining the link between women’s status and terrorism
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221095886 |
| Author | Kyle Kattelman,Courtney Burns |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Unpacking the concepts: Examining
the link between women’s status
and terrorism
Kyle Kattelman
Department of Social Sciences and History, Fairleigh Dickinson University
Courtney Burns
Political Science Department, Bucknell University
Abstract
In this article, we examine how changes in the status of women affect the intensity of terrorism by using three novel
approaches. First, we link terrorist ideology more directly to women’s status using a well-tread topic in feminist
literature that is rarely applied to political violence: misogyny. Second, we provide more explicit linkages to misogyny
by disaggregating terrorist ideology into four typologies (ethnonationalist, religious, right-wing, and left-wing),
arguing that the first three have strong themes of masculinity and patriarchy; ideologies when taken to their extremes
distill into misogyny. Finally, previous efforts to study gender equality frequently suffer from imprecise theory and
concept stretching. We sidestep this issue by instead focusing on women’s status and employ a new series of measures
that broaden our understanding of women’s status from a rights-based approach to one that includes women’s
security, inclusion, and legal rights. We do this by disaggregating 634 terrorist organizations to determine whether
the level of specific women’s status indicators affects the frequency of violence from specific terrorist ideologies. We
test this on a sample of 185 countries from 1970 to 2014 and find that increases in women’s security provoke
violence from ethnonationalist and religious groups while increases in women’s legal rights incite violence from right-
wing groups.
Keywords
ideology, misogyny, terrorism, women’s rights, women’s status
The role of women’s rights in the fight against terrorism
has been repeatedly stressed by public officials and acti-
vists in recent decades. At the signing of the Afghan
Women and Children Relief Act in 2001, President
Bush remarked that ‘a central goal of the terrorists is the
brutal oppression of women — and not only the women
of Afghanistan’ (Bush, 2001). Across the political aisle,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton linked the empower-
ment of women to national security issues, stating that
when women are given equal rights, ‘entire nations are
more stable and secure [ ...] The subjugation of women
is, therefore, a threat to the common security of our
world’ (Clinton, 2010). These statements are best perso-
nified by Malala Yousafzai, who as a teenager was shot in
the head for speaking out against the Taliban and pro-
moting women’s education. Remarking on the impor-
tance of women’s rights, she stated, ‘we know that
terrorists are afraid of the power of education’ (BBC
News, 2013).
Yet despite the robust body of literature linking
improvements in women’s status to a reduction in vio-
lence, the multidimensional nature of gender equ ality
obscures precise identification of causal pathways, which
is often restricted to measures of women’s rights only
Corresponding author:
ktk94@fdu.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2023, Vol. 60(5) 792–806
ªThe Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433221095886
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