The Micro-Level Effects of Civil Wars on Multiple Dimensions of Women's Empowerment

WarEffects aims to advance a systematic, nuanced, and rigorous understanding of how civil wars affect women’s social and political empowerment at the local level. Recent quantitative research suggests that civil wars promote women’s political representation, but these accounts reflect country-level aggregate measures and often focus on a minority of political ‘elite’ women. Thus, they do not inform us how subnational and individual-level variation in civil war experiences affect the majority of ‘non-elite’ women at the local level. To address this challenge, I propose a novel theoretical framework that simultaneously explores the effects of civil wars on i) multiple dimensions of women’s empowerment in the household and family, the community, and local politics. Moreover, I introduce ii) nuanced definitions for different types of exposure to civil wars, iii) the difference between changes in gender roles and gender attitudes, and iv) the moderating effect of context conditions. Building on the variation of each of these four dimensions allows me to generate a large set of hypotheses to advance a systematic and nuanced understanding of when, why, and how civil wars promote women’s empowerment, and when they do not. To empirically explore these hypotheses, I will combine novel quantitative survey experiments and qualitative research in Colombia, DR Congo, and Sri Lanka. While each country case has experienced several decades of civil war, there is significant within-case and between-case variation in social context, conflict dimensions, patterns of violence, and conflict status, rendering them ideal for exploring the local effects of civil war violence on women’s empowerment. Drawing on this comparative design will allow me to make statements about common patterns, divergences, and conditional effects. Altogether, this wealth of findings will establish a new conceptual and empirical research platform on the impact of civil wars on gender relations.