Is There a Link Between Conflict Sexual Violence and Women’s Rights?

• In Event: Gender, Sexuality, and Human Rights

Abstract

Existing literature indicates that civil and international conflict upend long-standing societal norms and structures and work to improve women’s rights within post-conflict environments. Less is known about how conflict characteristics impact the positive effect that conflict has on women’s rights beyond duration and intensity. Attempting to fill this empirical gap, we investigate how gendered conflict processes influence post-war women’s rights. We argue that the gendered nature of SV prompts women’s mobilization and civil society organizational pressures from below while also attracting attention from the international community that prioritizes women’s security from above. As such, post-war governments are more likely to prioritize policies that improve the status of women and women’s rights to alleviate these pressures. We test our hypothesis using women’s political and social rights measures from Varieties of Democracy v12.0 (Coppedge et al. 2020) and the Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict Dataset (Cohen, Nordås, and Nagel 2021). Preliminary evidence suggests that women’s rights improve post-conflict as states face domestic and international pressure to improve rights.

Authors

• DeAnne Roark, Cornell University

• Gabriela Cirenia Okundaye, University of North Texas